Chapter 7 Trial by Catnip #4
“Your divine brother leaves holy water welling up from his bare footprints on marble and fire-flowers blossoming out of a dead stick he touched on the way up some hermit’s mountain.
I don’t think I want to trust your sense of normal object interactions.
” She scritched Sahar’s ears, smiling at the vigorous purr.
“Cats knocking things over for mischief and a check for any exploitable loopholes in local gravity? That is so entirely normal that it’s reassuring.
I hope I can rely on your sweetie to help me recognize whether any of the Archives’ containment systems for the cursed spellbooks have sprung a leak.
And the imp infestation is particularly irritating this year; I hope her kittens grow into good little imp-mousers, because the swarms are getting too clever for the warding. ”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t follow…?”
“She’s diverting you from your self-blame,” Kamil said.
His pupils were almost narrowed enough to pass for normal again.
“If she chatters distractingly enough, you sometimes get caught up in the religious and philosophical significance of cats’ mischief, or the Eldest Archivist’s taste in reading material, or the Archives’ imp infestation. ”
“You weren’t supposed to tell him that,” Najra said, glowering.
“Oh, dear,” Faraj sighed. “And if you are diverting me from my blame, then I should not permit myself to be diverted from the blame I deserve.”
“Of course you should. You’re not going to wallow in misplaced guilt for the rest of forever, are you? —No, don’t answer that. I have met you.”
Kamil coughed, so that he wouldn’t laugh.
“Right. So there’s four paths I can see out of this tangle,” Najra told him, “but one of them won’t happen, and I don’t need to be a prophet to foresee that.
You’re not going to stop caring what’s best for the people around you and go power-mad now that you’ve tasted the nectar of irresponsibility, so let’s write that off.
Another is squeezing yourself back into a miserably rigid and inflexible snare, which I admit is entirely too plausible.
But fortunately I’m not going to let you get away with that one.
That leaves changing the system either subtly or spectacularly.
” With a sharp grin, she said, “I’d do it spectacularly, but I’m not you.
Therefore, assuming you don’t think leading the women and the catfolk on a yowling revolution is as good an idea as it sounds to me—”
“Oh, mercy, no,” Faraj said, both hands over his eyes, but he couldn’t block the smoldering ember-flares of the fires in his foresight.
“The people who suffer the most when cities burn are never the rich. The marketplace burns first — they’d burn the Catsprowl before the Archmage and the High Priestess could actually herd cats to try to stop it, and then — the Archives—”
“All right, you’re the prophet here,” Najra said. “If we want to change the system more gently than the torches’ revolution, you tell me where we start. To make just enough trouble for the people who deserve the troubling.”
“I can’t see how,” Faraj breathed, struggling for a glimmer of light amid the seething, leering shadows.
He took a careful grip on the arm of the bench before he lost all sense of his body, and then he dove into the shadows.
Long-trodden paths that had been as bleak and narrow as black rivers had surged over their banks in a wildly frothing flood of potential, swirling eddies of gossip and power-plays and extortionate smiling insinuations and the riotous color and chatter of the marketplace with all its thousand dramas.
A third of them dragged him back to the capital, to his brother’s priesthood’s sternly disapproving supervision. Too many ended in fire. Some of them ended in floods when he was too far away to send the warnings in time.
Sahar mewed, and turned around and walked away through his visions. Heart-stricken, he reached out towards her, and his fingers passed through her.
…wait.
If his fingers passed through what he saw, then —
Then she was walking into his visions. Or her spirit was. Somehow.
No one else had ever seen the things that danced at the edges between his sight and his foresight. But if Sahar shared his soul, if she shared his vision—
Sahar mewed at him again, clearly impatient. If he’d had to put human words around it, he wasn’t sure whether it would be Well, are you coming? or Hurry up, the food bowl has not been refilled yet.
“Your pardon, O softest of queens,” he said to whichever of her might hear. “But I’m not accustomed to having a guide, and if I walk after you too literally this balcony is not as spacious as our vision.”
“Get up and follow her,” Najra said. “Your eyes are full of starlight. Go on. Follow her.”
“I can’t see the edge of the balcony,” Faraj admitted. When the visions crowded out his more ordinary sight, he often lost his place in the world.
“So? Kamil and I can,” Najra said. “Even if you don’t trust my sense of mischief, you can always trust him.”
Sahar meowed her exasperation.
“Yes, I’m coming, O velveted one,” Faraj said, and stood up to hurry after her.
Satisfied, Sahar turned into the seething shadows and wound her way through a shadowed forest of charred wood and black silks, echoing with chattering laughter that might be jackals or opportunists or both.
A cobra-priestess hissed and spat invective while one of her hooded acolytes struck between his fingers — very precisely between his fingers, into the folded layers of a broadleaf bowl that the priests of Upaja offered to anyone who came to their shrine in need.
The acolyte tasted the air, then twined herself around Kamil like a sinuous rope of glittering onyx and gold jewelry; Kamil stood still as a statue, but Faraj knew him well enough to know that he felt some complicated tangle of anger, resignation, and a very sharply pointed amusement as he stared down from the dais in the Temple of Bastet.
That poor herding girl’s demon-touched goat loudly bleated its outrage, and a tendril of the seething Dark twisted round and offered it a cracked amphora of kumiss.
Bemused, Faraj could only think that if a demon-touched goat in the grasp of the Dark was bad by itself?
Then surely the only thing worse than a drunken demon-touched goat would be a hung over and irritable demon-touched goat in the grasp of the seething Dark that really Faraj couldn’t let himself look at too closely.
Or else he would be honor-bound to ask some terrible questions about the potentially infernal origins of some of the Catsprowl tavernae’s kumiss suppliers, and looking too closely at the questionable sources of Catsprowl tavernae beverages never, ever led anywhere he wanted to have to see. He hurried after Sahar.
She leapt onto a table in his private study in the Archives.
A page turned in a book that—
Master Asharan smiled up at him from the page of the book, wearing jasmine blossoms and blushing roses and oh mercy where were his clothes—
Shai Vishal wiped the same blood-scarlet as the roses from the delicate brush in his hand, and said, “I should have known you’d be behind all this.”
“I’m so sorry,” Faraj said, stricken. Of all the people to see his innermost fantasies, the righteous High Priest who would hold Sahar’s incarnation in his judgment was perhaps the most disastrous choice short of his brothers.
Of course his nadhir’s foresight would lead him to the most terrible of outcomes.
“Don’t say that unless you know what you say, your Highness. You cannot make penance without understanding.” Shai Vishal set the brush down. “What have you done that you truly regret?”
If Shai Vishal could see as deeply into his soul as he feared, then surely he could see how, once upon a time, Faraj had dreamed…
He couldn’t give voice to it, not even in visions. But he couldn’t lie to Shai Vishal, not even a foreseer’s dream of him.
“I shouldn’t have been so selfish,” he said, and that was a truth that held all of the truths trembling in his heart. “I shouldn’t have used my power for my own desires.”
“That is your regret?” Shai Vishal looked at him so intently that Faraj dreaded the thought that the High Priest’s power might have pierced the last veil of privacy over his breathless soul. “Your Highness, with the power vested in you, what will you change?”
Faraj took another step, needing to beg for mercy or forgiveness or—
—Kamil’s claws grazed the back of Faraj’s neck as he grabbed him by the gold-woven collar of his jama.
“That’s enough. That’s far enough,” Kamil rumbled into his ear. “Step back now.”
“It’s not far enough yet,” Faraj said, but his feet knew the difference in the brickwork near the edge of the balcony now that he was aware enough of his own body to feel the difference through the soles of his embroidered shoes. “It’s not far enough right now. But I know where I must go next.”