Ibn Rachid al-Fassi lived in a house that resembled a library that had decided to pass itself off as a home. There were books everywhere — on shelves running from floor to ceiling in every room, on tables and chairs and windowsills, in crates stacked in the corridors, in niches carved into the walls. Books in Arabic, Persian, Berber, Hebrew, Latin — the languages of human knowledge accumulated over centuries of curiosity and patience. Youssef ibn Baaddi stopped on the threshold and looked at this accumulation with something that resembled respect mixed with slight unease. He had grown up in a muezzin's house — a house of prayer and music, not books — and this profusion of texts gave him the feeling of entering a place where ordinary rules did not apply. — Come in, said a voice from the depths of the house. I was expecting you. ✦ Ibn Rachid al-Fassi was seventy years old with the energy of a man of forty. He was small, lean, with a precisely trimmed white beard and round glasses perched on an aquiline nose that gave him the look of a learned bird. Youssef took out his father's manuscript and placed it on the desk. Ibn Rachid took it with hands that trembled slightly — not from age, Youssef understood, but from emotion. — Baaddi ibn Youssef, he said softly. I knew him as a young man, when he came to study in Fez. He already had this obsession — finding the origins of Andalusian music. I thought it was the hobby of a passionate young man. I see now it was a vocation. He opened the manuscript and began to read, standing, without sitting, without drinking, without speaking. Youssef waited. ✦ That evening, Ibn Rachid said: This manuscript is not just a collection of melodies. It is a complete theory of music — a musical cosmology. Your father spent thirty years collecting melodies throughout al-Andalus, but also from much older sources. Berber sources. Amazigh sources. That night, Youssef found a letter hidden in the last pages of the manuscript. A letter from his father. *My beloved son,* *If you read these lines, you have succeeded in fleeing and found Ibn Rachid. Praise be to God.* *What you carry is not just music. It is a key. A key to understanding who we are.* *There is a woman in the mountains of the central Atlas — an Amazigh woman who keeps a memory I could not reach. Her name was given to me by an old musician from Tlemcen. She is called Lalla Zineb. If you can find her, she will give you the last piece of the puzzle.* *I love you, my son. Walk straight.* *Your father, Baaddi* Youssef smiled in the darkness. He now knew where he had to go.