Chapter 3 #6
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 be particularly 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 laughed at, 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 been spoiled, rather than fermented. So on their tax returns, someone reported the thousand barrels of bouza they 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 still had 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 of his barrels would leak. ”
There, that was 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 your hajib at once—”
“Before that,” Faraj said, releasing him from his obeisance with a hand on one shoulder instead of both, because it would have been unkind to anoint him with spilled hot chai. “Could you send for someone who can let my cat in? I’d be quite grateful.”
The guardsman looked at him as though he were speaking in tongues.
Faraj was fairly sure he was presently speaking in the language of the Imperial court rather than the common Basteti street-tongue, because they’d left little Priye in the marketplace with the actual tent, but he tried again.
“She’s expecting her kittens any day, you see, and I’d prefer not to need to walk all the way to the Lion Gate to ask the stablehands to let me stay in a stall outside the curtain wall with her.
So if you know who’s maintaining the wards these days… ?”
“A stall— but—” He swallowed hard. “Your Highness, a thousand pardons, but cats are forbidden within. It is not done.”
“You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve already said that this morning,” Ahmed said wearily.
“I suggest you find a way to get it done, young man. Or else you will have the God-Emperor’s third brother sitting in the dust outside your gate, playing with his forbidden cat with a knotted tangle of yarn scraps, until someone who can have both our heads on a pike comes down from the Upper Falcon Gate and demands to know why this is happening.
I do not wish to explain it to either your supervisor or mine. ”
“But… how…?”
“That is not my problem,” Ahmed said, with a certain relish. “I am not the one barring the God-Emperor’s own brother from crossing into the safety of the haveli.”
“But—”
“My problem is getting his Highness to the Ministry of Finance before Deputy Minister al-Faruq asks why we are late, and I am forced to tell him it was because an officious young guard denied the shahzada entry at the Lower Falcon Gate. What is your name again?”
Do you need the cavalcade of cat toy infantry? Mistress Salimat’s dry voice asked in Basteti, in an exquisitely crisp partition at the edge of his thoughts.
Faraj replied, I think not, my lady, or else not yet? Ahmed is very nearly terrifying when he has a grievance he can make into someone else’s problem.
“But cats are forbidden within the haveli!”
“Because they could be an infiltrator or the familiar of a hostile mage, yes,” Faraj said.
“However, we know exactly whom Sahar has claimed for her own. She’s claimed me.
So if there is anything within the haveli that she might see, that someone would prefer that I should not see…
well, I would wonder why they would prefer neither I nor my cat should see it.
And I might remind you I do have a touch of prophecy.
Someone would have to hide a scheme very, very deeply to hide from both my eyes and hers. ”
And since Ahmed had proposed it as such a grave and unthinkable offense against the Way Things were Done, Faraj sat down in the dust of the road and took Priye’s little yarn strand from his sleeve.
Kamil silently set Sahar’s box next to him, outwardly serene, though the twitching of his whiskers spoke volumes of how hard he was fighting not to break composure. Ahmed closed his eyes and murmured a brief prayer for forgiveness, and both of the guards turned a bit gray.
Sahar was delighted by the dangling bit of yarn, especially when he dangled it close enough for her to bat and gnaw without too many vigorous gymnastics.
“I can’t let your cat in, shahzada,” the young guardsman said miserably. “I’m not a mage.”
“Then I suggest you find someone who is a mage — an Imperial mage — before the shahzada summons a Basteti market-witch to try her hand at breaking the wards,” Ahmed said.
“I would settle for a pallet in the stables, if someone would help Kamil with the guarding,” Faraj said.
“You will not settle for a pallet in the stables,” Ahmed said firmly. “I would summon the witch myself first.”
All of them stared at him.
“Shahzada, what I want is very simple,” Ahmed said.
“I want all of this irregularity to be dealt with and behind us so that all of us go back to our work. Installing you in the stables because no one will allow you your royal whim is most irregular. And it will continue to be most irregular for as long as your stubbornness crashes against the wall of propriety. I have learned today that your stubbornness is just as formidable against your loyal servants as against the tax frauds and reprobates you pursue. The people of the Empire serve the God-Emperor’s will, and the God-Emperor’s will is that we of the Empire keep His prophet safe in this uncivilized city of prowling alley-cats.
So the faster we get you an exception for the cat that everyone else would be forbidden, regardless of whether the mage who breaks the wards for you is Imperial or Basteti, the faster we all get back to work and put this entire farce behind us. ”
“Yes, sir,” the young guardsman said to Ahmed, and took off at a run.
Heart-stricken, Faraj stared up at him.
I wanted him to see that the ban against cats and cat-familiars doesn’t make sense for Sahar when I’m the prophet of the God-Emperor and they know she’s mine.
But it doesn’t make sense for any other Imperial mage either, he thought.
Not for a loyal one. Or for any peaceful Basteti mage, or the catfolk who want a choice of their shape.
Or for Master Asharan’s Nehal. Master Asharan is so clear that he wouldn’t want to visit me here that I’d forgotten he couldn’t send Nehal to visit me even if he wanted to.
Surely this city holds more merry and mischievous little cats than sorcerous spies and assassins. Surely there must be some other way to guard against the actual villains. And we make no prohibitions on humans, when all it would take is a misplaced servant’s garment to give them a similar disguise.
But I only questioned the ban once I had a cat of my own.
I hadn’t thought I was being selfish, thinking the rules didn’t make sense for me. But the rules never made sense for anyone else who wasn’t planning malice either.
I’m just the first with enough power and influence to demand my way regardless.
And that’s …still nothing new to anyone else here.
Ahmed was staring at the second guard, very pointedly standing in the road sipping his chai. The second guard was ignoring them all, looking back and forth along the road, scanning down the switchbacks for any dust-bursts that might indicate approaching, hidden footsteps.
And… I’ll still use it, today, Faraj decided, stroking Sahar’s side gently. I can’t change that here, now, sitting in the middle of the road. Tomorrow I’ll start working on a better solution.