Free Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King

of Fez, and he was here to stay.
    Offered rooms in either place, Holmes had chosen to stop here rather than in the Residency, and had spent the past few days happily wandering the tangled streets that were equal parts Granada and Cairo, and wholly their own. Fez was the centre of Morocco, its heart and soul, rich and clever and lovely, and deadly as a Miniago stiletto. And its Resident General, manly and open with no taste for intrigue, was both unsuited for the task and the best hope of the country.
    Yes, Holmes decided, he would return here with Russell before they sailed back to England. Having spent the past year in foreign parts, once they reached home, he doubted he’d prise her away from Oxford for a long time.
    He coaxed a hot bath from the geyser (his last, he suspected, for some days), then packed his bag and left Dar Mnehbi, heading for the railway station.

    Eleven days after leaving Fez—days filled to overflowing with sand, remote hills, the Arabic language, the Islamic world, and rather more excitement than Maréchal Lyautey would approve of his country having given one of its visitors—Holmes stepped off the train in Rabat, drawing a deep breath of the fresh sea breeze.
    It was jarring, to go from a time spent far from motorcars and telephones, beds and newspapers, into the modern European bustle of Rabat. Holmes looked down at his travel-stained garments. He’d bundled away his disreputable djellaba , but in truth, the European trousers and jacket were not much of an improvement. He needed a bath, and a shave.
    Rabat was enough of a European centre that, as he’d suspected, Fridays were less scrupulously observed than elsewhere in the Moslem world. Outside the train station, he brushed aside the mid-day clamour of hotel-boys and taxi drivers and headed to the portion given over to native trade. He picked out a cart with wheels that appeared to have seen grease in the past decade, addressing the startled driver in Arabic.
    “ Salaam aleikum . Do you know the Hotel de Lyons? Near the waterfront?”
    “A’salaamu aleik,” the driver replied automatically. “Yes, of course. But—”
    “Good.” Holmes threw his case into the back, and, after a murmured Bismillah , climbed in beside it.
    The bemused fellow looked at his horse, at Holmes, and followed him up.
    When Holmes had left Russell, seventeen days before, they’d agreed to meet on Friday the nineteenth, at the hotel where Fflytte Films was ensconced. He rather hoped she would be out when he arrived; no need to inflict his present disarray on her. And (here he fingered a neat circle near the hem of his jacket, wondering if he could contrive to make it look less like a bullet hole) no need to point out that he’d had a more interesting time than she.
    Seventeen days before, there had seemed little point to him cooling his heels while she finished with her cinema project. And since he’d found a replacement for his rôle in the moving picture (a corpulent ex-headmaster who looked the very image of a modern Major-General—far more than Holmes ever did), he had packed a bag and merrily left his wife behind, to pay his respects to a distant cousin and explore a country he’d never seen.
    He turned his attention to his driver, engaging him in fluent Arabic while absorbing the man’s gestures and the distinctive manner of driving (one never knew when one would need to act the part of a Moroccan horse-cart driver) and noting the details of the town around him. He saw more European faces on the short drive to the hotel than he’d seen the entire previous week—strolling the pavements, eyeing the windows, sipping coffee along sidewalk cafés. He had to agree with the Maréchal: A person would never believe that bloody rebellion seethed just 125 miles away.
    They arrived at the hotel, which was run-down enough that a doorman did not instantly appear to order the cart and its passenger back into the street. Indeed, there was no doorman. Holmes climbed