Chapter 5 The Way Things are Done #5
“Or, of course, I could keep his cat right here in the Archives. Where all the Archivists and all the scholars and all their junior secretaries will want to know all the details of how we’ve come into possession of an actual cat-familiar, right in the middle of the warding that is designed to keep magical familiars out,” Najra said brightly.
“His Highness’s personal chambers see much less gossipful foot-traffic.
But if you are utterly set against it, ya bir Enayat, I’m sure I can make her a cat bed in a nice, noticeable sunbeam in the reading room.
Just think how many people will want to coo over the kittens. ”
It wasn’t that Najra didn’t know how to play the games of powers, Faraj reflected, watching the clenched muscle in the Chamberlain’s jaw twitch. She absolutely knew how. She just wasn’t the least bit gentle about it, and she took no prisoners.
Years ago, when they’d first met, he’d absolutely meant it when he’d told her he very much preferred the futures in which they could be friends. He could survive disagreeing with Irfan and be reasonably confident that there would be a way to mend their relationship with care and kindness.
He didn’t even want to look at the futures in which Najra, the Archivist who had brought five chests of cursed spellbooks to keep confined within the Archives’ deepest wards, decided that she wanted to make a rich and privileged shahzada’s life unpleasant.
Because he knew that she knew exactly the hexes to do it with.
The Chamberlain could certainly choose to make a rich and privileged shahzada’s life unpleasant as well, but he had personal standards that he would insist upon upholding.
Faraj was entirely certain his Chamberlain’s pique would not extend to scorpions in the bedding, oozing poxes, gibbering ghouls, and … well.
To be entirely fair, the Chamberlain might have a very good point about some forms of unholy and forbidden magics.
The challenge was going to be in persuading the poor man that rambunctious kitten-familiars gnawing on his ledgers and galloping through his beautifully-set diplomatic banquets and knocking over his oil lamps and staining his silks were not entirely a calamity on par with plagues of locusts and shambling undead legions.
Faraj had always thought Irfan was a beautiful man, even beyond his careful attention to his clothing and his grooming.
The expression on his face looked rather like a holy martyr sculpted from amber and ebony as he said, “Come, then, your Highness. Let us ward your chambers against the forces of darkness, necromancy, and kittens.”
Mistress Salimat had had the good sense to retreat when the courtly powers had begun shouting, because she made her way through the world by not catching the personal attention of powerful Imperial noblemen who thought of market-witches’ magic as unsanctified at best and anathema at worst.
Esha, bless her name, had stayed. She’d also kept Ahmed from entirely fretting himself to pieces.
Faraj didn’t quite dare ask Kamil if he had silently asked Esha to be a common-born Basteti witness, one who would be able to tell the people of the Basteti marketplace if one round little cat-familiar in an unexpected place was truly seen as such a threat to the rich and powerful God-Emperor’s priesthood.
If he didn’t ask Kamil, then he didn’t formally know the answer.
But he could encourage the not-officially-a-conspiracy with his own most diplomatic smile: “Honored Esha, would you do me the very great favor of advising me upon the best ways to safeguard my chambers against kitten incursions? My dear Kamil has been entirely respectable for years, you see, and none of the rest of us know the caprices of kittens with such familiarity as your own.”
“I would be delighted, your Highness,” Esha said, holding his eyes steadily, and, Faraj suspected, trying not to be seen noticing the Chamberlain’s agitation. She might not be a courtier, but a good trader learned many similar techniques around plausible deniability.
As they walked through the marble-lined and gold-trimmed halls of the haveli, Faraj couldn’t help glancing at her in particular.
She looked particularly overwhelmed by the carpet, of all things.
But then, she was a weaver and a fabric-crafter; she would know how much it had cost for each of the dyes and all of the intricately figured designs and the strands of goldwork that gleamed beneath the lamplights and the charmlights.
Faraj had never watched a common-born Basteti woman take in the richness of the haveli’s architecture.
The nobles of the court considered the Tel-Bastet haveli and fortress a notably lesser imitation of his brother’s great palaces and shrines in the capitals of each of the realms He had claimed for His Empire.
Faraj was accustomed to thinking of Tel-Bastet’s haveli as a charmingly less formal, less extravagant place.
The marble here had been cut as inlays and overlaid in ornate patterns on a much older sandstone substrate.
In the God-Emperor’s capitals, entire buildings were made of single massive chunks of marble cut from a single quarry, without caring for the waste when they were hollowed out; the display of flawlessly matched perfection was the entire point.
Patchworks made of marble-scraps and semiprecious gemstones were unimaginable in the greater capitals, however charming the effect might be here.
Faraj understood the difference in the comparative cost; he had spent years in the tax returns of five realms. But when he imagined the perspective of Basteti-born eyes…
Even the Temple of Bastet itself was carved of sandstone, not inlaid with marble.
The sculptures were painted and dyed and draped in fine linen, not studded with gems. The amount of goldwork on Bastet’s ancient shrine-sculpture’s jeweled inlay was probably outmatched by the edge-trimmings in any single hallway here.
He wondered what Master Asharan might think of the haveli’s marble inlays and the exquisitely dyed carpets that were barely noticed by the courtiers who walked upon them. And then he tried not to wince.
Sahar was entirely unruffled, of course. Her basket was being carried by her much larger catfolk-kinsman, who would keep her, her kittens, and her chosen person safe; all was right with Sahar’s world. She was even purring softly.
Hikmat levitated the carpet that carried them up fifteen stories of the inner courtyard; it was both a security measure and an extravagance not to have built stairs between the levels.
And Faraj really couldn’t blame the boy for quietly staying at the inner balcony, where the servants awaited commands.
The Chamberlain was someone that no one in the household wished to upset, if they had a choice.
The door-wardens of the private hall leading to Faraj’s chambers were very well trained.
One’s eyes widened slightly at the sight of the cat-basket in Kamil’s arms, but he made no other sign of surprise; the other didn’t even blink as she bowed to him and unfastened the locks and the bindings on the outer and inner doors.
Faraj had also never welcomed a common-born woman into his private rooms before.
Seeing the way she stared around at the furnishings, the bookshelves and the desk and the silken draperies shading the interior and the thousand-year-old royal artifacts displayed on the walls, he suddenly felt terribly underdressed somehow, and not at all prepared to welcome a stranger into an area even more private than his study in the Archives.
Especially a woman. Because Faraj was unmarried, and he hadn’t even inquired as to whether Esha was.
His brothers, he knew, had no such qualms about inviting unmarried women into their bedchambers.
Being noticed in his brothers’ chambers was more often a type of imperial favor.
Women were pleased by his brothers’ attentions, because it implied they were desirable to men whose desire was worth capturing: a renowned leader of the armies and an admired diplomat of the courts.
Oh, a prophet was certainly valuable, of course, but a prophet was expected to behave himself in more decorous, more scripturally-obedient ways.
Mercifully, a prophet of the God-Emperor’s faith was not expected to have illicit affairs and illegitimate children, and Faraj had often felt a certain gratitude at the cover it provided him.
But by the same token, his own desires, whether for books or cats or handsome men who tended jasmine plants in his dreams, were not as well regarded among the court.
Such desires offered the ambitious too little scope for climbing the echelons of power.
His childlessness, even illegitimately, meant he offered no blood-bonds as a lasting path to the innermost circle of the God-Emperor’s court.
But still, he should have considered Esha’s good name, even if her presence hadn’t intruded upon his foresights with any flares of trouble beyond what he had already created.
He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of his foresight as limited, not when he regularly woke from dreams of fires and floods that impacted the whole city.
His foresights most often came through the eyes of other people, at other times.
But he hadn’t fully considered how often his foresights presented him with troubles that affected those in his orbit.
Specifically, in his own royal and Imperial orbit.
He had dreamed of Master Asharan’s hands, but not his face, because he had dreamed the view of the window through Master Asharan’s eyes.
He had dreamed that future from the past because he had made it true.
He’d taken himself to the place of his dreams, and altered the orbit of his life in ways that changed the future.