A cat mewed and scratched at the outside of themashrabiyascreen. Shai Vishal considered discretion for a moment, then decided there was no way a Temple cat would be able to puzzle out a cypher keyed to a name he hadn’t used for decades. He unlatched the screen, and the cat immediately leapt through onto his desk. It was a big tawny tom, but after a wary sniff at the ink smudges on his fingertips, he arched his back into Vishal’s hand, purring quietly but so deeply Vishal might have mistaken it for a thunderstorm in another season.
Vishal was going to have toask the Archmage,wasn’t he. Because nothing in the God-Emperor’s holy writ would ever defend sorcery like this. His Highness could not make an appeal to the tenets of his faith when his faith held no defense for him.
And the High Priestess of Bastet would befartoo delighted by the opportunity to make the Imperials squirm about whether the human owned the cat or the cat owned the human, when the human in question was the God-Emperor’s own prophet. To say nothing of the Priests of the Assessors of Maat, or any number of priests arriving for the Greater Convocation who would salivate at a chance like this.
That left the Archmage, who was the sharp-clawed shelter for many a wayward young mage who had run afoul of some priest or some Imperial. (There was some irony that the new mage in question was new only in terms of his art, and Imperial and powerful enough that she would usually have taken any other side in such a debate.)
Vishal would have to be very, very careful with his asking. The Archmage would be just as delighted to make the Imperials squirm as Bastet’s High Priestess. But at least she would not gossip with priests or Imperial nobles about any leverage she could seize for her own. For all that she was catfolk, she hoarded her knowledge like a dragon.
And he was about to need to pry just enough of that knowledge out of her claws. Without letting her guess why. Without getting her so curious that her nose for secrets honed in on why Upaja’s High Priest would ask her such a thing, on behalf of a nameless new mage whose presence she had not already noticed for herself, but who had somehow gotten himself in enough trouble to upset the Empire. …Which healsocouldn’t tell her, could he.
He couldn’t ask the Archmage. Shai Vishal was a clever wordsmith, his practice honed by years of both courtly rhetoric and priesthood. But the Archmage was catfolk, and a power who respected no God but herself.
But any trial, any judgment, held two sides to the tale. If his Highness would provide no defense for himself…
Finding some discreet way to defend a man who could not defend himself, without compromising Vishal’s own need for a priest-judge’s serene neutrality, within the fortnight before the Greater Convocation consumed his every waking minute? This mess was going to be so damnedcomplicated.
Shai Vishal sighed, poured another measure of oil into the lamp on his desk, wished for a measure ofaraqfor his cup, andwrote on a piece of parchment,Give me three days. He folded it, sealed it with a blob of wax, and set it on the corner of his desk to send up to thehaveliin the morning.
The cat’s eyes reflected the gold of the lamp-flames, still purring deeply as Vishal scratched behind his lynx-tufted ears.
10
A Gift of Respite
FARAJ
When the God-Emperor’s brother had asked for architectural modifications to his chambers, and when both his Chamberlain and the Deputy Minister were motivated to support those modifications as quickly as possible, carpenters and craftsmen scooped up their tools and ran to the inner courtyard’s carpets to offer themselves in service.
Sahar’s new kitten-enclosing wooden nursery door had been installed in the frame of his study’s stone-latticedjharokhawithin the afternoon, along with a colorful assortment of silken pillows and feathered toys and dangling beaded curtains. When he settled her carrying-basket into the sunniest corner, she bumped her head against his wrist and purred.
Although the Imperial patterns and the ministers’ expectations were swiftly enclosing him again, he couldn’t bear to leave her alone at night. After the last of thekhadimunahad extinguished the charmlights and bowed their way from the royal chambers, leaving the human guards outside the door, with Kamil sleeping the sleep of the watchfully exhausted, andthe night guardian Kala prowling around his garden balcony, Faraj still waited for a few minutes more.
It was harder to hear the near-silent movements of a barefoot devotee of Pakhet the Night Huntress and harder to foresee in the dark, but he held his breath to listen carefully. Once he was certain all was still, he gathered up a sheet and a pillow and unlatched the woodenmashrabiyalattice that had been hung and hinged to keep Sahar and her kittens within the enclosed balcony of thejharokha.
Faraj was as little accustomed to curling himself up in ajharokhato sleep beside a cat-familiar’s basket as he was to sleeping beside a terribly handsome enchanter. But when he closed his eyes, the rumble of her purring so close to his cheek reminded him of the House of Jasmines, and the gentle rasp of her grooming his beard was an unexpectedly ticklish delight. He slept more soundly than he had expected with a warm, soft, round, purring cat curled up on his chest, and occasionally batting his nose with a paw or thumping his wrist with her tail if his snoring disturbed her.
Far more disturbing was the shriek of the morning’skhadim, upon discovering his Imperial Highness curled up in thejharokhawith one ankle dangling past the inner ledge and something thick and gray splayed across his chest and throat. The poorkhadimhad been utterly terrified that his prince had been sorcerously murdered and left in thejharokhaby the killers, until Faraj had also shrieked and sat up in his own startlement at the screaming.
And then Kamil and Kala and Sahar had all begun yowling their own furious indignation at the thought that anyone could have threatenedtheirshahzadathroughtheirmore-than-human vigilance. And then Faraj had had his hands entirely full with the need to assure everyone that no one had died, no one had nearly died, no one had sleepwalked through thejalior offany balcony ledge, andno one should trouble the Chamberlain in any wayabout all this unexpected chaos.
Once he had been dressed for the day and performed the morning prayers and broken his fast, for better or for worse, he still had the previous day’s un-dealt-with paperwork piled on the desk in his study… which meant he had the perfect excuse to stay in his chambers paging through documents and scanning for the shadow of falsehoods. That perfect excuse also extended to making sure that Sahar was comfortable, well fed, petted whenever she wished, and that no one brought even a foresight-shadow of something sharp and silver with them.
Irfan spent most of the morning working with him on the arrangements for the evening’s diplomatic banquet with the early-arriving priests and priestesses who were gathering for the Greater Convocation. When three to six months of travel separated Tel-Bastet from their homes at the eastern and western reaches of the Empire, some of them arrived earlier than others. And, of course, the Priests of the Assessors of Maat began gathering as soon as they could spare essential members of their number, because there was always a certain rivalry between the order-loving priests of Maat, many mischief-loving cat-priestesses, and the chaos-loving jackal-headed priests of Set.
Each new diplomatic dinner was a newly wobbling balancing act, because Faraj didn’tforeseethe arrival of new priests unless those priests planned something particularly troublesome. That meant that he depended on the staff’s notice and Irfan’s skill to hastily rebalance the seating arrangements and the evening’s menu.
No one had reported a falcon-priest-sighting from the gates, mercifully. The High Priest of Mentu the Bloody was a difficult individual in the best of times, and Faraj was glad to delay that particular balancing act a bit longer. That left them with only —only,he thought wryly — six Priests of the Assessors of Maat, the cat-priestesses of Bastet, Sekhmet, and Pakhet, the High Priest of Menas, the High Priestess of Hathor, and the Cobra-Priestess of Meretseger to worry about. (In addition to a handful of priests and priestesses who were much less worrisome, of course, but even the gentlest of them had a glimmer of trouble-shadows brewing.) Hathor’s High Priestess meant that Irfan had already struck beef from the menu, but now they were debating the eggs.
The Cobra-Priestess of Meretseger did eat hen eggs herself, and she often enjoyed them, but Irfan was rubbing his brow anyway.
“Your Highness,” he said, “pray consider the spectacles the High Priest of Menas may choose to create with a pair of soft-cooked eggs.”
The High Priest of Menas was difficult in a way entirely different from the High Priest of Mentu the Bloody. Mentu’s High Priest Khunsu shrieked like his falcon-headed god and swooped to pounce on the tiniest of details.
Menas was a human god of, er, well, masculine attributes: virility and fertility, quite noticeably. As a person, the High Priest of Menas, Neferkamin, was bright and warm and lasciviously playful, and more than happy to share his appreciation of every human figure.
Faraj had always known better than to take his flirtations personally, although his enticements were …sometimes very difficult on Faraj’s self-control. But of course the religious and theocratic implications meant he couldn’t possibly accept such public seductions from a priest of another god. Still, he also felt an odd sort of relief to know that no mockery lay behind it; Neferkamin treated everyone he found appealing with that same avid appreciation.
