Lighting another candle from the first, he unfolded the parchment. Blood stained the outer layers, but Gershom had folded it often enough to protect the message. When Myrad opened the last fold he saw the script and its mirror image written in red. He swallowed, understanding. Without ink, his father had cut himself to write a final message in blood. With no time to blot it, the original and its mirror stained the innermost folds. There were but three lines, four words total, one in Greek and two in Hebrew.
    The first was Rhagae.
    This he recognized easily enough. The city of Rhagae sat at the southern end of the Hyrcanian Sea and served as a stop on the trade route running from the Qian Empire in the east to the Roman Empire in the west. Centrally located in the Parthian Empire, it served as a major distribution point for goods coming from the surrounding empires.
    The second word was Hebrew for calendar. There had been no time for his father to write an explanation, yet none was needed. Every day for the past two years, since Gershom brought Myrad into his household, his adoptive father had painstakingly marked the passing of each day at sunset on a stack of parchments. Every thirty days he would mark the end of another month in a different column in the center of the page. Only twice did he mark the completion of a year, a twelve-month span of three hundred and sixty days in a column on the far left of the page. Myrad often joked the calendar was Gershom’s life’s work.
    “Several lifetimes, in fact,” his father would say, smiling at his jest.
    Myrad shifted his attention back to the bloodstained message. The last line on it, also in Hebrew, was Amin Ben-Yirah.
    From the beginning, his father insisted Myrad add Hebrew to his studies of the more common languages of Greek and Aramaic. He displayed a gift for tongues from working in the market, and lately they had taken to speaking Hebrew to each other in halting phrases when they were alone. Ben-Yirah. He knew what the word meant, but he needed more. Was it a name, as it appeared, or was his father conveying one last message to his son?
    As soon as the thought occurred to him, he dismissed it. While not physically imposing, Gershom had been the bravest man Myrad knew, even more because of his gentleness. He’d taken a stand against Musa despite the threat, and when he realized what was coming, used his dagger on himself to provide the ink to get this message to Myrad.
    A flame came alight in his heart. Sitting there, knowing himself to be pitiful and powerless, he vowed to exact a price from Phraates and Musa. “Great or small,” he whispered to himself, “somehow I will make you pay.”