“You are a deeply kind man, and well aware of your power,” Shai Vishal told him. “As a result, you are on occasion excessively gentle with those who have hurt you. I believe you will understand if I tell you that in this one matter, your Highness, I find your word less reliable than usual.”
He couldn’tpossiblyexplain that it had never been Shai Vishal’s fault if, many years ago, a lonely prince had once had fantasies that of course a priest of a different god would not,couldnot share with the God-Emperor’s prophet. The shadows of Shai Vishal’s shock and distress and guilt-staggered recalculations of politics and power flared like dark fire in the corners of his eyes.
With a sigh, Faraj said, “I swear upon my brother’s holy name that I am most sincerely grateful for every compassion you have shared with me. I would invite you to grant yourself such compassion as well.”
“Your Highness, you have not convinced me that you would not offer a surfeit of kindness to one who has hurt you, even unwittingly. But in honor of the kindness you offer…” Shai Vishal cupped his hands at his brow in invitation of his god’s generous mercy, and murmured,“Tathaastu aur ‘amiin.”
16
Proclamations and Yowling
FARAJ AND ASHAR
In Faraj’s prophetic foresights of trouble worth the making, Shai Vishal had challenged him:Your Highness, what will you change?
From within the marble-lined halls of power and the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Finance, he had perhaps overestimated how much change a new proclamation from the hand of the God-Emperor’s brother might offer to the everyday lives of the populace of Tel-Bastet.
At least, when that proclamation had to do with tax rebates and cat-authenticating collars rather than prophecies of impending disaster, the humans seemed much less interested than they had been in his more fiery (or flooded, or sometimes locust-swarmed) proclamations.
The cats were another matter entirely. According to Kamil’s network of connections among the city, the moment most catfolk heard the wordcollars,they were off and yowling before much of anything else about the proclamation might penetrate.
Faraj was a bureaucrat of considerable practice, and if he dared flatter himself, considerable skill in the word-wrangling of edicts and pronouncements. He had worked late into the night with both Najra and Irfan at his side to polish thewhereas-es and the inasmuch-es and even the calligraphic flourishes which scribes would copy all over the city.
He had perhaps erred too much in favor of the benefits of Order and Collars for guiding small and four-pawed feline paths to thehaveli, but he knew that he needed the approval of the city’s Council of the Divines to ask the priests’ scribes to lend their pens to the effort. Six Priests of the Assessors of Maat were enough to significantly alter the balance of the Council while the Priests of the Assessors were in the Temple of Bastet and insisting upon their right to observe and weigh upon all matters of Order.
He had to admit that he’d given consideration to delaying the proclamation until after the Greater Convocation, when the assorted additional priests had left Tel-Bastet for their returning journeys to their homes. But he himself had said to Shai Vishal that a now-traditional injustice was still unjust, and he could think of no reason beyond his own cowardice to delay the righting of that wrong for more than another month.
(Besides, in another month, Najra might well have been tempted to give some other cup of revolutionary heresy a nudge off the book-ledge to see what patterns the shattered pieces might make upon the floor, and to claim it a distraction from his own troublings of tradition. He would better serve civilization by making sure her gleeful shatterings of tradition came at least abitmore conveniently spaced for those of faith to bandage the cuts and bruises of the fallout.)
In any case, he had sent the proclamation to the Council of the Divines for consideration, and they had approved it with far less debate than was customary. He had not been in attendance; since he had drafted the proclamation himself, it would be unseemly for the God-Emperor’s prophet’s mantle of majesty to weigh upon the catlike independence of the Council in a proposal of his own making. But he could imagine howboth the High Priestess of Bastet and Shai Vishal would likely have placed their own weight of power upon the scales. And if the outland Priests of the Assessors of Maat had fussed that the proclamation was not Orderly enough for their liking, he could imagine few ways of provoking a dozen Basteti cat-priestesses into supporting a not-Orderly-enough proclamation. Even if it had mentioned collars.
He had hoped that the guards would soon carry word of catfolk seeking entrance to thehaveliand the Archives and various folk seeking tax credits for the averting of disasters, infestations, or mice. But in the first days after the proclamation, he heard nothing of the sort.
To be fair, in the first days after the proclamation, his limited free time was very much occupied with hunting through fifteen stories of thehaveli,twelve of the Archives, three of the barracks, and three sets of attics for whatever dark and sheltered nook Sahar had been hiding herself and her kittens in.
Kamil had assigned himself to door-warden duty the third time he had emerged from a storeroom covered in dust he would need to groom off every inch of his fur, and Faraj couldn’t blame him in the slightest.
Irfan had quite thoroughly disposed of the loose white cotton garments that Kamil had purloined for Faraj’s adventure to the Temple under Sami’s name. Faraj couldn’t help a twinge of guilt for whatever cook or guard orkhadimhad lost a part of their wardrobe to a royal squabble. He’d sent gold with Kamil to see the laundry-woman and the garments’ owner compensated for the loss. But in the meantime, his own alternatives for climbing into attic hatches and investigating dusty chests and cupboards and wardrobes were either his saffron-dyed and gold-embroidered silks of state, or his silken blue night-clothes. He had decided that at least the night-clothes were at least not embroidered, and easier to launder.
Irfan had found himself a plain cotton servant’s kurta and shalwar, of course. Faraj was not the least bit surprised. Irfan had been quite clear that his Imperial Highness Nur-ul-Shuruq Faraj al-Nadhir, the prophet of the God-Emperor, wasnotto be found awkwardly wedged under a disused guest-bed in an attic when he hadservantsfor that. The only surprise had been that Irfan had insisted upon accompanying Faraj himself, rather than sending akhadimor three on the cat-hunt.
When they’d set out, Faraj had fitted one of the Archives’ charmlights onto the handle of his cane. That way he could both illuminate the nooks with a safely flameless light for Irfan’s hands-and-knees investigation and also guide his own steps across unevenly laid boards amid dusty heaps of relics, artifacts, storage chests, and unfashionably pre-Imperial furnishings. He had also bundled up a satchel of unglazed bowls and a waterskin from the kitchen, and he left water bowls and nibbles of dried fish wherever he thought a cat might find appealing. He couldn’t be certain whether the cat, the mice, or the imps had eaten and drunk his previous offerings, but he refilled each of the bowls dutifully as they re-crossed their own paths.
Irfan wriggled back out from under a centuries-old bed frame with far greater ease than Faraj himself had, though his hair was thickly greyed with dust and his cheek was smudged. Looking at his dirtied hands with distaste, he said, “If only we could suppose that the cat hadwalked,we might be able to narrow the search by tracks in the dust-layers, but of course we cannot suppose that at all.”
“I truly am sorry, Irfan.”
Irfan shook his head, and then sneezed at the dust-cloud. “I owe you this, your Highness. I owe her this, since you have accepted her anchor into your soul. If your people are now to guard her as we guard you, it will be a great relief when she comes to trust that I no longer wish to part her from you. When— well,if, but I hope when — she no longer hides herself from my presence.” A bit rueful, he added, “I should also send thekhadimunato tidy up the attics and storerooms more often, if we are soon to have even more cats prowling into the undusted nooks and coming out covered in centuries of dust to scatter across the silks and the tapestries that they sprawl upon.”
“I had hoped we might have more interest from the catfolk by now,” Faraj admitted.
“You will understand if I am grateful we do not, your Highness, given that the last of Archivist Najra’s portable cat-warding market-witcheries stained acid-bleaching into the dyes of your silk handkerchieves, and I will be relieved for years to come that I didnottest them directly upon a thousand-year-old work of art.”
“If it were a simple matter to keep cats’ noses out of mischief, I am certain the market-witches would no longer bemarket-witches, and would instead have wealthily retired to a library filled with as many cursed spellbooks as they could accumulate,” Faraj admitted. “But we might still test the handkerchieves’ cat-aversion properties? Perhaps among the mousers in the barracks’ stables?”
“As you say, your Highness.”
Something bright was bobbing toward the hatch to the attic, and a few moments later a young mage-guardian with a charmlight hovering over her shoulder poked her head up through the opening.
