“Get up and follow her,” Najra said. “Your eyes are full of starlight. Go on. Follow her.”
“I can’t see the edge of the balcony,” Faraj admitted. When the visions crowded out his more ordinary sight, he often lost his place in the world.
“So? Kamil and I can,” Najra said. “Even if you don’t trust my sense of mischief, you can always trust him.”
Sahar meowed her exasperation.
“Yes, I’m coming, O velveted one,” Faraj said, and stood up to hurry after her.
Satisfied, Sahar turned into the seething shadows and wound her way through a shadowed forest of charred wood and black silks, echoing with chattering laughter that might be jackals or opportunists or both.
A cobra-priestess hissed and spat invective while one of her hooded acolytes struck between his fingers — very precisely between his fingers, into the folded layers of a broadleaf bowl that the priests of Upaja offered to anyone who came to their shrine in need. The acolyte tasted the air, then twined herself around Kamil like a sinuous rope of glittering onyx and gold jewelry; Kamil stood still as a statue, but Faraj knew him well enough to know that he felt some complicated tangle of anger, resignation, and a very sharply pointed amusement as he stared down from the dais in the Temple of Bastet.
That poor herding girl’s demon-touched goat loudly bleated its outrage, and a tendril of the seething Dark twisted round and offered it a cracked amphora ofkumiss. Bemused, Faraj could only think that if a demon-touched goat in the grasp of the Dark was bad by itself? Then surely the only thing worsethan a drunken demon-touched goat would be ahung over and irritabledemon-touched goat in the grasp of the seething Dark that really Faraj couldn’t let himself look attooclosely. Or else he would be honor-bound to ask some terrible questions about the potentially infernal origins of some of the Catsprowl tavernae’skumisssuppliers, and looking too closely at the questionable sources of Catsprowl tavernae beverages never, ever led anywhere he wanted to have to see. He hurried after Sahar.
She leapt onto a table in his private study in the Archives.
A page turned in a book that?—
Master Asharan smiled up at him from the page of the book, wearing jasmine blossoms and blushing roses andoh mercy where were his clothes?—
Shai Vishal wiped the same blood-scarlet as the roses from the delicate brush in his hand, and said, “I should have known you’d be behind all this.”
“I’mso sorry,”Faraj said, stricken. Of all the people to see his innermost fantasies, the righteous High Priest who would hold Sahar’s incarnation in his judgment was perhaps the most disastrous choice short of his brothers. Ofcoursehisnadhir’sforesight would lead him to the most terrible of outcomes.
“Don’t say that unless you know what you say, your Highness. You cannot make penance without understanding.” Shai Vishal set the brush down. “What have you done that you truly regret?”
If Shai Vishal could see as deeply into his soul as he feared, then surely he could see how, once upon a time, Faraj had dreamed…
He couldn’t give voice to it, not even in visions. But he couldn’t lie to Shai Vishal, not even a foreseer’s dream of him.
“I shouldn’t have been so selfish,” he said, and that was a truth that held all of the truths trembling in his heart. “I shouldn’t have used my power for my own desires.”
“Thatis your regret?” Shai Vishal looked at him so intently that Faraj dreaded the thought that the High Priest’s power might have pierced the last veil of privacy over his breathless soul. “Your Highness, with the power vested in you, what will youchange?”
Faraj took another step, needing to beg for mercy or forgiveness or?—
—Kamil’s claws grazed the back of Faraj’s neck as he grabbed him by the gold-woven collar of hisjama.
“That’s enough. That’s far enough,” Kamil rumbled into his ear. “Step back now.”
“It’s not far enough yet,” Faraj said, but his feet knew the difference in the brickwork near the edge of the balcony now that he was aware enough of his own body to feel the difference through the soles of his embroidered shoes. “It’s not far enough right now. But I know where I must go next.”
8
The Way Things Should Be Done
IRFAN
Irfan bir Enayat al-Sadiq held to his name and his breath and the mask his father had taught him when he was five years old.
Thekhadimunacouldnotbe permitted to see the storm roiling his mind and his heart. He had betrayed too much in the privacy of the Archives and his Highness’ chambers. But the halls of the Imperial residence were public, and full of eyes; the Imperial residence was his own domain to master, and his own duty. He held his head up, he breathed out his pain and his hurt and his anger, he breathed in his God-Emperor’s faith that permeated the halls of thehaveliin every chosen scent of incense and every fragrant flower. Heknewhis work. Heknewhis place. So long as he drew breath, the Empire would have the best of his service.
If His Imperial Highness had been corrupted to the soul or ensorcelled or otherwise compromised, then it was even more essential that Irfan had to be flawless in his efforts to contain the damage to the Empire’s stability.
The morning had already been too gravely disrupted. He would need to move swiftly — swiftly, butcalmly— to prevent further exposure, further gossip, further disruption. He couldbe hurt and angry and bewildered and afraid in private, on his own time. This was not his own time, not yet. He still needed to control himself and the situation.
It did not help that thekhadimunaloved gossip nearly as much as they loved the Empire.
