“I advise you not to tell her that, your Excellency,” Irfan told him. “She enjoys breaking priests.”
“Someoneordained this one too?”
Najra threw her head back and howled with laughter.
“No one has ordained this one,” Irfan said, still holding Faraj’s hands. “More the opposite, really.”
“And you consort with them both?”
“Try keeping them out of your business,” Shai Vishal said. “Like Bastet’s cats. Or else you might trade pointers, given your persistence.”
“You consort with women and cats, you bar auditors from your presence while you alter the books of record?—”
“What?”Najra said, outraged. “You take that back!”
“—you mask the evident infirmity of the God-Emperor’s prophet?—”
“No, we’re not letting the books go,” Najra said, taking books off her lap so that she could get into a priest’s face. Or at least into his collarbone; for all her ferocity, she was not very tall. “I. Am. An.ARCHIVIST.If you intend to start slinging accusations, you had damn well better bring your receipts.”
“Najra,” Faraj tried, but his voice broke embarrassingly.
“What is his problem?”
“He is not your problem, she is,” Kamil pointed out.
“Thank you, Kamil.” Najra thumped her rolled-up notes against her palm. The motion caught the priest’s eye and he grabbed it out of her hand.
Unrolling the sheaf of notes, the priest turned them sideways, bemused. “What…?”
“Thatis how you cypher,” Najra said, with a particularly sharp grin. Her notes looked like stylized rows of cats and kittens and yarn-loops and the occasional fish part. “Thatis also, you will note,nothow tofalsify records.And it’s in silverpoint. I don’t have ink here.”
“What on earth are you peoplehiding?”the poor priest wailed, knotting a hand in his headscarf.
“I’m sure the cats would love to know as well,” Shai Vishal said. “It was a crisis of faith, as I told you earlier. In ordinary circumstances, that entitles a person to privacy.”
“You cannot possibly persuade me these areordinary circumstances.”
“Well. With your permission, Most Learned?” Shai Vishal asked Najra, with a shift in his posture that hinted of an old, courtly bow.
“Oh, be my guest.”
“We were discussing how to persuade Archivist Najra that kicking the theological foundations out from under the God-Emperor’s faith was not advisable for the stability of civilization, regardless of how entertaining she might find it.”
It was perfectly true, however incomplete. The poor priest looked so bemused Faraj was almost certain he wouldn’t question whether there was more to it than that.
“Whose priest are you, again?” Najra asked, grinning. “If you’d like to be relieved of all that pious duty, give me a god’s name and I’ll get right on it.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,ya ustadha,” Irfan said, valiantly trying to ignore the kitten who had climbed his sleeve and was sniffing at the sensitive nook behind his jaw.
“Who said anything aboutnecessary?Hilarious, though. I’m sure it’ll be hilarious.”
The poor young priest looked as though he was giving serious consideration to fleeing back into Shai Nanda’s hands as a less dangerously sacrilegious alternative to staying in a room with Najra. To be fair, Faraj was almost entirely certain he’d judged the relative risks appropriately; Shai Nanda was at leasta priest herself. But some utter dedication to the righteousness of order steeled his spine; he bent close enough to study Faraj’s hands, murmuring numbers under his breath.
And then he said in something almost like betrayal, “You haven’t lost a ring.”
For once, the kitten-pressure eased at the perfect moment. Faraj tried not to gasp, and leaned on every elocution trick he’d ever been taught to keep his voice mild and calm. “Should I have?”
“I — but— that woman said?—”
