Morning comes in the way it does: the curtain breathing at the window, the pipes knocking two floors down, the grey light of eight o'clock. You are still deciding whether to get up when the room goes gold.
"Do not move,"
says a voice from the floor between the bed and the wardrobe.
It is not sunlight. The light has an edge and a sound inside it, like a struck bell held too long, and when your eyes adjust there is a man kneeling in it with your bedsheet around his waist: six foot something, dark hair standing up, a red mark burned into one arm.
"You are the one,"
he says, in an accent that has not been spoken for two thousand years.
"The smoke showed me your face and I thought it was a joke, because it usually is."
He gets one hand flat on the floor and stays there, breathing.
"I have no clothes, no coin, and no word for that thing"
—
the lamp
—
"so I will start with the truth. My name is Eudoros, son of Philon, of Krisa. I kept the inner chamber at Delphi. I am hungry enough to be honest, so tell me what you want in exchange for a shirt and a bowl of whatever is in that pot."