With a vast sigh, Kamil said, “I can lift you,shahzada.I can’t lift seven hundred pounds of carved marble and gold and ebony even if I tore off the mattresses and the draperies.”
“Could you pull on my ankles, though?”
“…Shahzada, the way I am built to pull involves sinking my claws in.”
“Could you try?” He didn’t want to have to say aloud how much he would endure to avoid Irfan finding him stuck like this.
Kamil’s hands were very warm, and yes, very sharp at the tips. He felt Kamil sink his claws into his night-clothes, and felt a huff of hot breath as he bit carefully into the waistline of hisjama, and then Kamil’s back claws scrabbled ferociously for traction on the inlaid marble of the floor.
Something ripped, and Faraj felt a gust of air where there really oughtn’t have been a breeze.
“Uh,” Kamil mumbled around a mouthful of silk, with a ticklish flick of whiskers against Faraj’s suddenly-bare skin. He spat out the silk and said, “Sorry about that.”
“None of this is your fault,” Faraj said, trying not to sneeze on a ticklish dust-fluff that had brushed across his nose. “I will make all the necessary apologies to the seamstresses and thekhadimuna.Do you suppose, if I could get a rope or one of the sheets over my shoulder, if that might give a better grip… ?”
“I’ve still got no traction. Unless we can hook something through ajali,but if the stonework gives way… or your collarbone…”
It was difficult to sigh when your ribs were solidly pinned down by the edge of a marble-and-mahogany bed frame. And while it was difficult to foresee in the darkness beneath the bed, he could imagine how badly breaking his collarbone or his ribs trying to escape a blunder-trap of his own making would be received, by not only his Chamberlain but also his physicians, his guard, and the soon-to-assemble priests of every faith in the civilized world at the Greater Convocation.
Kamil’s breath shifted to a soft rumble that was not at all a purr, and so Faraj could imagine the Chamberlain’s expression quite clearly even from the darkness under his bed.
“Will every day be like this?” the Chamberlain asked, wearily. “Will every morning be a race against the disruption of those little demonspawn, pulling you away from your duties to our faith and our work before the sun has even risen? I could scarcely imagine more effective agents of sabotage.”
“I thought that I heard kittens mewing?” Faraj ventured.
“That ismypoint,” the Chamberlain said sharply. “If only one of them has disordered your sleep and disrupted your household before even the crack of dawn, and there will be half a dozen more at any time? You know how the priests of Maat will judge all of us. You know they will publicly question the God-Emperor’s fitness to rule if His own brother, His ownprophet, cannot manage so simple and predictable a matter as daily prayers timed to a sun that we all know shall rise.”
“Are you going to lecture him or are you going to help?” Kamil demanded.
“I don’t knowhowto help this! I don’t know how to help that every day one of our loyalkhadimunahas come to me in distress or in outright terror at some predicament his Highness has found himself ensnared by, with the fear that he might have come to grief under our protection.”
“If you can’t figure out what to do about the fact thatright nowhe’s wedged under the bed, then get out of my way while I fetch some hefty guards,” Kamil growled.
“That clearly doesn’t solve?—”
“That solves the problem in front of meright now.” Kamil’s tail thumped irritably against Faraj’s ankles. “You can gnaw his ears off about the inquisition until they get here.” The warmth of him moved away, and Faraj briefly wished he could crawl all the way under the bed and just hide there.
“So where is the creature, if you brought it out for cosseting and it escaped your grasp?”
…that… sounded like Sahar was not in thejharokhaeither.
“I can’t see in the dark, Irfan,” Faraj said, as casually as he could manage under the circumstances.
“And it’s scratched you.” Faraj heard a soft splashing, like a cloth being wrung over a bowl, and then a startlingly cool wet pressure against the scratch-stings in his thigh. “Unless that was Kamil, in his ever-valiant efforts to save you from yourself.”
“It was my fault in either case, not either of theirs.”
“Your Highness, I have known you for years. You have never been like this before. You would not have been trappedcrawling under your bedwithout that creature’s temptations to lunacy.”
“I cannot claim this situation to be the most pleasant of my unexpected adventures in new pet ownership,” Faraj admitted. “But I am happy to report there is no greater danger lurking beneath my bed than an unswept dust-bunny. And once the kittens are safely here…”
“Then what, your Highness?”
He had to admit he really couldn’t think of a soothing way to finish that sentence for his distressed Chamberlain.Then there will be six or seven of them rather than onewould not help. Neither wouldthen they can find even more interestingnooks to make even more challenging messes,orthen I may be dreaming seven cats’ worth of under-the-furniture prowling-dreams rather than one.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the embarrassment of the Chamberlain’s interrogation was supplanted by the embarrassment of many well-armored figures clanging and chiming their way into his bedroom. Kamil took irritable charge of who was to tilt the bed from one side, who was to steady it from the other, and who was to help Faraj out from under the bed frame without further knocking sense out of his clearly already-rattled head.
The moment he came clear, he could see the difference between the darkness under the bed and the darkness of the leering foresight-shadows tangled about the soldiers’ avid speculation about who would have been so brazen as to ride the God-Emperor’s brother under his bed, about the torn night-clothes and the cat-scratches and?—
