The water in the bowl rippled. Irfan realized his clenched hands were trembling against the surface of his desk.
His Highness was …compromised.
Kamil could have been compromised as well.
Archivist Najra was at a minimum delighted by the chance to study the soul-binding’s effects upon his Highness, and at most hadknowingly sent himto be infiltrated.Influenced. When his Highness had struggled all his life to keep his independence amid a court full of smiling silk-robed vipers plying their dreams ofinfluence,and now this one hadpowerbehind its pressures.
The guardians who tamed their sorcery to the God-Emperor’s service would not see ensorcellment ascompromise,but they ferried freight and warded walls and purified water and sealed off cursed artifacts. None of them were charged with theclarity of foresight necessary to guide the Empire itself through flood, famine, and cataclysm. None of them were entrusted with the great secrets of state. None of them even bothered to look into the tax records; but coin and knowledge were the fuel of the Empire, and some unknown sorcerer had attached a spying set of eyes to his Highness in the guise of a charming creature that purred.
Either his Highness had knowingly permitted it, or he had been compelled, and then made to believe that he had permitted it. This was precisely why charmcraft and ensorcellments of the soul had always been forbidden by the God-Emperor’s edicts.
Irfan couldn’t afford togive awayleverage. But Shai Vishal was a scrupulously fair man.
Fair men were notoriously difficult to corrupt. But fair men could be swayed, if you could persuade them of your truth.
He would need a cypher. He couldn’t entrust any of this to bare ink in the hands of a courier who thought it nothing but royal whim. And he would need to embed the cypher in a sizable body of text.
Fortunately, he had every reason to cite extensive quantities of scripture in the making of his case.
Irfan stilled himself carefully, took a deep breath, and stepped in front of the mirror that hung on the back of his office’s door. He shouldn’t have permitted himself such visible distress earlier, so much that Esmat had noticed; hisjamawas still askew and his hair much too disheveled. He put himself sharply to rights, straightening the fabric, dampening his fingers in the lotus bowl to reshape the crisp curls of his hair and mustache, touching up the kohl rimming his eyes. Then he opened the door.
His junior scribe Fakhri waited in the desk nook a discreet distance down the hall; he set his pen down immediately, and bowed with a hand to his heart.
“Your Eminence, Kubra sent word that the priests will need access to your chambers for mischief-wardings, when your leisure permits it.”
“Thank you, Fakhri, but it may be some time before I dare dream of leisure,” Irfan said. “Advise them to begin with the areas his Highness frequents. And ask in the scriptorium if we have any clean, unbound copies ofThe Pillars of the Sun,The Illumination of al-Hanif, andThe Wisdom of Majada. I will need a copy of each.”
Fakhri blinked, but rallied valiantly. “If we don’t have them right now, your Eminence, we will have them by the evening meal. Sooner if I can manage it.”
“Thank you, Fakhri.”
The young man bowed again, then turned on his heel and dashed toward the scriptorium. Some other day, Irfan might have spoken to him about decorum, but… today, it was all he could do to see the door properly latched before he sank to his knees in front of his desk.
He had to admit, thinking the thoughts that he was presently thinking… if his Highness had foreseen what Irfan was on the verge of committing to paper, no wonder his Highness had never told him until after it was too late.
But if his Highness hadchosenthe future in which he knew his soul’s allegiance would be compromised…
Irfan cut a sharp edge onto his reed pen, reached for a fresh sheet of parchment, and began to write.
9
The High Priest’s Penance
SHAI VISHAL
The High Priest of Upaja, Shai Vishal, had never been the sort of man that children would eagerly run up to with smiles and flowers and chattering.
Several of his junior priests were more charismatic; Shai Nanda was the honorary scandalous auntie to half the city that wasn’t already of auntie-vintage, and to those who were auntie-aged, Shai Madhur’s smiling sweetness tempted them into so much pinching of his round cheeks that he’d learned to duck behind a cauldron or a pillar whenever certain matrons got a particular glint in the eye and a twitch in the fingers.
So it was a bit unusual, but not entirely surprising, to find that Shai Madhur was surrounded by chattering children patting him and each other and tucking flowers in each other’s hair as he gave them blossoms and little treats from among the offerings left in Upaja’s statue’s hands and lap.
It was not atallsurprising that the flock of children took assessing looks at Shai Vishal and Shai Jyoti as they approached the cauldrons to relieve Madhur and Nanda during the change from the morning shift to the afternoon shift.
Shai Jyoti was unusually lean for a priest of Upaja, and Shai Vishal understood himself to be unusually forbidding. Sothe children scattered like a flock of pigeons when Jyoti took Nanda’s palta at the cauldron ofkheerand Vishal took Madhur’s palta at the cauldron oflauki dal.
The kittens didn’t scatter; kittens knew with supreme confidence that nothing would dare trouble them in Bastet’s Temple, and some of them took impertinent glee in sprawling in the most inconvenient spots on the sun-warmed stone.
Shai Vishal gently nudged one out from underfoot despite the irritated yowl, and said, “You know you would hate dal drips in your fur even more, scamp.” He looked around.
