“Sun Gate, Lion Gate, Path of Starlight, Moon Gate, Falcon Gates, River Gate, loading dock?” Mistress Salimat rattled off, as though she’d done this a hundred times before.
“Which is closest?” Faraj asked, feeling a bit green.
“Take us to the Falcon Gates,” Kamil said. “They’re furthest in. Can you get us up to the Upper Falcon Gate?”
“Not without crossing the wards. The Lower Gate is easier.” With an assessing glance at Ahmed’s robes, she added, “Closest to the Ministry of Finance too.”
“Deputy Minister al-Faruq is going to have my head,” Ahmed muttered, face in his hands. “This is most irregular.”
Their illusion-tent bounced and bobbed and trundled their way through the marketplace and the city, up toward the walls of the fortress that overlooked the city on three sides and the bend of the river on the fourth. Mistress Salimat knew which alleys to take far more accurately than Faraj could have managed, and Kamil’s lack of growling suggested he approved of her choices.
They walked though the outermost gates without so much as a pause, and the guards there clearly didn’t see a thing; thesun dimmed for a moment as the little tent trundled under the shadow of the outer gate, into the courtyard where the soldiers drilled and the stables and barracks waited. Faraj thought wistfully of the place he might have had in the stables — he was not quite foolish enough to imagine himself in the barracks — but the central compound and thehaveliitself still waited, beyond both the training courtyard and the outer gardens.
After a bit of conferring with Esha, Mistress Salimat stopped the tent just beyond the bend of the last switchback in the Path of Starlight, just out of sight from the Lower Falcon Gate.
“You three first, and then Esha and I will show up if you need help getting through?”
“Thank you,” Faraj said, and tugged the curtain free of Ahmed’s desperate grip. Mistress Salimat blinked at his saffron silks, clearly noticing the sun-in-splendor goldwork of the God-Emperor’s symbology. “I find myself rather curious how often you’ve done this sort of thing before, Mistress?”
“No you’re not,” Mistress Salimat told him crisply. “Because if you don’t ask about my business then I don’t ask about yours. Go on, take your chai and your cat-basket. It’s harder to go unnoticed here, not enough distractions.” She snapped her fingers over the kulhad,rather like Master Asharan had with his cauldron earlier, and suddenly three of them were brim-full and steaming again.
“Well.” Faraj bent to pick them up and handed one to Ahmed and the other to Kamil. He ventured a smile. “Shall we?”
Faraj had never thought himself much of an actor, though he had spent enough years in deportment lessons that he could nearly always manage ‘blandly smiling’. He had occasionally been astonished at how good an actor Kamil could be, when he bothered with it. Sometimes Kamil was better at the diplomatic snarls than Faraj himself, when he decided he wanted to beparticularly feline. And, of course, Kamil was much better at acting fierce and dangerous than Faraj could ever dream to be.
Ahmed was an utterly terrible actor.
(Under other circumstances, it was reassuring to know that he could count on knowing the truth of what Ahmed thought, even when his foresight wasn’t warning him of danger. Honesty was not at all a given among the political wiles of either his brother’s court or the Ministry of Finance. Most of the time, he appreciated Ahmed’s honesty more than he did at the present moment.)
But even knowing as little as he knew of the ways that the common folk fetched their morning chai before they went about their day, Faraj was certain they did not usually do it in the way Ahmed was doing it: clinging to the kulhad with both trembling hands, holding it about a foot away from his chest as though it were somehow both his last prayer of salvation and likely to leap into his face at any moment, fiercely muttering prayers for the God-Emperor’s forgiveness and mercy upon the most humble of His servants.
Faraj sighed, and paused in the middle of the Path of Starlight. He had only ever seen it from within the curtains of a palanquin before; he hadn’t realized how much more brilliantly the mosaics set into the road would sparkle and shine in the sunlight, unveiled.
“S-sa– um–shahzada?”
“Take a sip,” he said, and did. The kulhad was very warm in his hands, and the masala was pungent and peppery; the palace’s blends were more refined, and Master Asharan’s were more extravagantly floral. But this cup was still hot and sweet and energizing. “It is easier to laugh together over our morning chai when neither of us is stricken with terror.”
“Yes,shahzada.”
Faraj had never been the one who found purposeful ways to make others laugh. He was fairly well accustomed to being laughedat,but he thought Ahmed would not find the courtiers’ jests about bureaucrats and accounting books any more amusing than he did.
But both of them were firmly in alignment when it came to the increasingly absurd lengths certain families would go to in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
“Have I told you how Archivist Najra and the priests of Upaja and I finally managed to puzzle out what happened to the other thousand barrels the Harimansi had claimed as a tax write-off?”
“No, your Highness?” Ahmed took a careful sip of his chai, still steadying the kulhad with both hands.
“I could almost admire the determination,” Faraj mused, and started walking toward the corner of the switchback. “Their accountant decided never to let a good crisis go to waste, you see, and the flooding truly had been dreadful that year. But they claimed the fruit inside the barrels had beenspoiled, rather thanfermented. So on their tax returns, someone reported the thousand barrels ofbouzathey sold to a hundred and eighty-three different taverna as ‘flood spoilage’ rather than ‘craft brewing.’”
Ahmed’s laughter had more to do with incredulity than joy, but Faraj still counted it a win.
“And you traced the barrels,shahzada?To a hundred and eighty-three taverna? The things I didn’t know about you!”
“Oh, not personally,” Faraj admitted. “We wouldn’t have been able to prove it if one of the taverna hadn’t hired a young catfolk apprentice who hadn’t been told about the scheme, who arranged to donate it to the priests of Upaja as the taverna’s tithe for the community. Then Shai Vishal passed me a note at the Council of the Divines, and he kept the barrel, which stillhad the maker’s mark and the lot number. So Archivist Najra found the rest of the tax paperwork for the tavernae, and their barrel numbers. And the barrel-wright was powerfully offended that the Harimansi had claimed a thousand ofhisbarrels would leak.”
There,thatwas the laughter he’d been hoping for, just as they arrived at the Lower Falcon Gate.
“Halt and declare…” The young guardsman who’d begun the standard challenge by rote suddenly realized whom he was speaking to, and actually dropped his spear. Then he dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground. “A thousand apologies, your Highness—why? Never mind, I’ll send for yourhajibat once?—”
