Chapter 3 #5
“Why, there’s no blackmail at all, when Rahat-sahib already intended to buy cat toys for his darling,” Esha said just as brightly, giving Faraj a significant look.
“Ahmed, are you telling me you would prevent Rahat-sahib from doing legitimate business with an upright and honest Basteti tradeswoman?”
“I am profoundly grateful that I have never needed to face you across a war council, my lady,” Faraj said, carefully easing out of the cat-basket the bag of his folded silk garments that Master Asharan had tended for him.
He suspected he was going to need the gold-flecked sealing wax that verified his sigil ring’s imprint in very short order.
“You cannot possibly be considering yielding to this harridan, sahib!”
“Ahmed,” Faraj said, “Sahar has made herself a home of my soul. She is a living piece of my heart. I would rather set up a little scholar’s nook in the tack room of the stables and live there myself than be forced to abandon her now, with her kittens coming any day.
I don’t know how to abandon part of myself at the gate.
I don’t know how else not to lose her. Do you have any better ideas? ”
Ahmed looked sadly down at the kulhad in his hands, and he said, “I miss the other path. The cup of chai, and laughing together.”
“Then you two should walk that path,” Esha said. “And if you need reinforcement, then I’ll charge the field.”
“Armed with a properly signed purchase order and three baskets of cat toys,” Kamil said, amused. “Sign it before you put your clothes on, sahib, so there’s enough time for the seal to set before Esha carries it into battle.”
“Do I need to change here?” Faraj asked, a bit wistful.
“Yes,” Ahmed said firmly.
“The guards won’t care nearly as much about a market-vendor shouting at a priest in a white cotton wrap as they do about whoever is wearing saffron silk,” Kamil agreed.
“It could get us past the outer gate,” Faraj said, reaching for an invoice slip and a silverpoint from beneath a weight-stone in Esha’s commotion-ruffled paper-basket. “But if the whole haveli is warded, the stables may be my best choice after all.”
Kamil and Ahmed traded a look.
“Think of the tax receipts, sahib,” Ahmed said.
“The foundation is ancient. Your family did not lay those stones, not here. Your family brought gilding and marble and an army of artisans to make the haveli a glory among the realms, and there remains a smaller artisan-army to tend to its maintenance. But the artisans lavish their craft upon… well… marble is visible. Cat-warding is not.”
“Security isn’t flashy the way gilding is,” Kamil agreed.
“If there’s a choice between marble on every single surface or warding every single surface, the courtiers choose the marble, with additional defensive wards in critical spots.
The armory, the treasury. The entrances to the Ministry and the Archives and the residential areas.
But not the stables, and not the barracks.
And the entrances to your chambers, but not within your chambers, because of me. ”
“Oh!” Only long self-control kept him from smudging the invoice in surprise. “So if we could get her as far as my rooms…?”
“Then you’ll have your fussy hajib and his herd of dutiful khadimuna to face down,” Kamil said. “That one is your battle, sahib. Your hajib still doesn’t believe I’m tame.”
“That’s because you’re not tame,” Faraj said. “You’re dedicated. That’s different.” He sparked a little flame between his fingertips to melt the wax, then pressed his sigil ring into it firmly.
It was difficult not to consider how such little magical sparks of light and flame were considered proof of divine gifts from the God-Emperor’s holy sun, but soul-binding and charm-compulsions were anathema.
Faraj could understand the philosophical point that every soul should be free to choose its own path, unbound and unbewitched.
Until the night before, he had counted himself among those who thought charms of compulsion and ensorcellments of the will to be well and properly prohibited.
But Master Asharan’s gently alluring invitations seemed much more akin to…
well… the cups of chai that Faraj and Archivist Najra often shared with the spirit of the Eldest Archivist, whom they had never dreamed to compel.
(Of course, he had been very careful never to let anyone notice that he sometimes spoke with the Eldest Archivist, that it was not solely a matter of Archivist Najra’s shameless heresy.
And the Eldest Archivist’s spirit was, if not entirely invisible to ordinary eyes, still much easier to overlook than an opinionated cat and her imminent kittens.)
He fanned the hardening seal with another invoice to cool it further, and then took the bundle of his clothing behind the curtain to change.
Esha made a startled sound when she picked up the invoice. “Rahat-sahib, this — I couldn’t possibly—”
“I am a rich man entirely besotted with my new pet,” he said, fussing with the drape of his jama; he never could quite get the lapped collar to settle smoothly without help, or reach the ties under his arms. “The more outlandish the sum, the more eagerly motivated you will be to deliver the goods before anyone officially informs me that cat toys are not usually valued in multiples of their weight in gold.”
“Or we explain that you’ve bought the entire contents of this tent and a spell strong enough to levitate them all the way to the Summer Capital,” Kamil said.
“Could we?” Ahmed asked, a bit desperately. “If we don’t… are you going to walk through the city in your silks, sahib? Out of this tent, in your finery, through the entire marketplace, wearing more goldwork and jewelry than half these people have ever seen in their life?”
“I thought you preferred I put these clothes back on,” Faraj said, trying not to sound too piqued.
“Yes, but — but — I thought we would summon a palanquin or a carpet or—”
“Are we going to summon a palanquin or a carpet to the market-stall of a cat-toy seller, and then expect people not to wonder why a cat-toy seller is being visited by an Imperial with enough rank to travel in a palanquin, when housecats are prohibited in the haveli?” Kamil pointed out.
“If he isn’t shopping for cat-toys, the alternatives people might invent are even more scandalous. ”
Esha said, “If we walk under a tent-illusion to the fortress gates under a charm of notice-me-not, then nobody needs to see Rahat-sahib walking out of my tent and through the marketplace, do they?”
The silence was a little too thoughtful. Faraj hurried with the ties.
“Mistress Salimat doesn’t ask questions,” Esha added.
Something clinked like coins, and by the time Faraj had fastened his shalwar well enough to pull back the curtain, she was already gone.
Mistress Salimat turned out to be a reed-thin middle-aged woman dressed in layers of colorful silks and veils edged with embroidered stars and jingling necklaces of moons cut from mirrors.
As promised, she didn’t ask any questions, even with Ahmed so noticeably holding the dressing curtain closed and Faraj’s not entirely subtle attempts to peek through.
She muttered to herself as she bustled about taking measurements and setting up moon-mirrors and sprinkling mica and cottonwood tufts and burning incense.
Then she spun four pairs of hands from the smoke — four pairs of hands that were considerably more muscular than the delicate smoke-twists that Master Asharan had called.
After a few minutes, the entire tent lurched as the smoke-hands pulled the mirrored poles up by the roots and trundled off.
Through the oddly cloud-hazy walls, he could see little Priye giggling by the original tent; she waved goodbye in their direction.
Faraj waved back, unsure whether or not she could see them, or whether she was following whatever magic-sense cats had that led them to stare raptly into otherwise empty-looking space.
Ahmed yelped in dismay as the lurching splashed the tray of chai again.
Sahar yowled her indignation. Faraj clutched at the swaying pole nearest to his elbow, grateful that it felt solid enough to support him and feeling as though he might have left his stomach along with his shadow back at the original tent.
“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; the sun 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 the haveli itself still waited, beyond both the training courtyard and the outer gardens.