Chapter 8 The Way Things Should Be Done #3
“I am not writing to the Ministry of Orthodoxy about his Highness’s cat,” Irfan said wearily, resisting the urge to rub his temples again, because the thought of writing to the Ministry had been briefly and terribly tempting.
“I am writing to Shai Vishal about his Highness’s cat.
Because his Reverence has lived in the Temple of Bastet for years, and I am certain he knows more of the proper management of cats around precious regalia and ancient works of art and faith and literary craftsmanship than I do. ”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Esmat said, making a mudra for the release of fear with both hands.
“And, please… you won’t hear any of the household say a word when his Highness keeps losing his jewelry around the Council meetings, after floods or disasters.
I truly don’t care why his Highness might have wished to help Upaja’s High Priest feed the hungry of the city.
I’m a cook, your Eminence. I don’t care who buys the food so long as the hungry can eat.
Please don’t bring the Ministry of Orthodoxy in. ”
“I assure you, I will never mention those losses to the Ministry,” Irfan said.
“None of the household deserve an inquisition, and if his Highness were so distracted as to misplace a few of his personal belongings, certainly he had more grave concerns challenging his foresights in such difficult times.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Exactly like that. You’re so much better at this than I am, your Eminence,” Esmat said. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” Irfan said. “If I may ask a favor, though, would you be so kind as to ensure that his Highness and Archivist Najra and Kamil are brought something mid-afternoon? She is caught up in her research and has quite swept them along with her, you see. Occasionally we may need to remind them of the need to nourish themselves with something more substantial than catnip tisane and the airy sparkles of the Archivist’s inspiration. ”
“If that’s not glory’s own radiant truth,” Esmat chuckled. “While you’re writing to the High Priest, your Eminence, since you’re so good at these things — I don’t suppose you might feel inspired to drop a hint?”
“A hint…?”
“We’ve all spent years not saying it,” Esmat said, “and his Highness has spent years not saying it, and everyone is used to no one saying it by now. But if anyone could drop a hint to the High Priest, your Eminence…”
“I couldn’t possibly,” Irfan said, honestly shocked.
He knew how long ago his Highness had spent a summer wistfully yearning about Shai Vishal, who had been as fiercely, blazingly honorable as any man Irfan had ever met.
A man whom his Highness could admire at just as safely impossible a remove as Archivist Najra’s modest and respectable sister Ghada, who was nearly everything the Empire might have wanted in a royal bride, if only she had been able to give birth to heirs.
There had always been an except, or an if only.
Shai Vishal might have been very good for his Highness, if only he had been anyone other than the High Priest of a rival god, and if only he had not so sharply renounced his Imperial birthright and all his noble family’s bonds to take up that rival god’s mantle.
Irfan also knew when his Highness had set that yearning aside, and turned his wistful thoughts into expensive ‘accidents’ of financial support to the community cauldrons. Of course Irfan knew. It had been his place to know, and never to breathe a single hint.
“You’re entirely sure?” Esmat said. “Wouldn’t it be romantic, after all these years?”
“You have just asked me for kindness, Esmat,” Irfan sighed.
“His Highness has trusted me for all these years. It would be more than cruel to betray what I might have glimpsed in his heart, after all these years. It would be more than cruel to betray those gifts he might have made. To draw the Ministry’s attentions to those losses, and to the ghosts of emotional entanglements that we know his Highness did not indulge.
To ensnare the good works of Upaja’s entire priesthood in sordid rumors of bed-debts between his Highness and their High Priest, who has taken such care to renounce his own birthright among the noble powers of the Empire in order to serve the poor of Tel-Bastet. ”
Even as he said it, he fought himself. Because there was power there for the taking, if he needed it badly enough. If the need to free his Highness from that velveted ensorcellment overwhelmed every other need.
I don’t want to use this, he thought. I don’t want to have to use this. Surely there must be some other way to see him set free.
“I’m sure you know best, your Eminence,” Esmat said. “I’m just a matchmaking old busybody who’d like to see his Highness smile more often. But then I’m sure his cat will be quite the charmer; they always are, aren’t they?”
“Yes, I’m sure his Highness’s cat will be quite the charmer,” Irfan said, grimly.
If his Highness has foreseen this night, this soul-binding, this fate, for half his life? Perhaps I should have told Shai Vishal long ago of the many ways his Highness has… admired him.
If I had told him years ago, perhaps this ensorcellment would never have come to pass.
“I’ll be sure they all eat something more than ink fumes and chalk dust, your Eminence,” Esmat said, bowing over her hands as she backed toward his door. “And there’s qanbaris and fruit in the katori, sir crow, when you notice the raven’s wing is also black.”
“Thank you, Esmat,” Irfan said, with all the dignity he could muster. “I will be certain to eat as well.”
She giggled like a much younger woman as she slipped out of his study.
Irfan knelt beside his desk and clasped his hands together almost in prayer, and found himself bracing his brow against his clenched fists.
If only. If only his Highness had foreseen a night with Vishal and Bastet’s kittens in the Temple, rather than with a sorcerer and a soul-binding, and the moon alone saw where…
Shai Vishal was one of very few souls whose purity Irfan did not question.
If only his Highness had spent that foreseen night in the Temple of Bastet rather than some sorcerer’s hovel — even if it had not been the God-Emperor’s own Temple, it would have been so much preferable.
And of course his Highness would never be able to admit if he had come to an understanding with Shai Vishal, for the sake of Upaja’s priesthood’s independence from the God-Emperor.
Perhaps that might even make sense of his Highness’s desire for a cat of his own. Bastet’s Temple swarmed with kittens; Irfan couldn’t imagine how their scribes could ever finish a work of illumination, but somehow they did.
If his Highness would not speak his tutor’s name because Upaja’s priests could not be too visibly entangled with the God-Emperor or His prophet in the eyes of the city…
Except that Shai Vishal would never have bound his Highness by the soul.
He would have given him a perfectly ordinary cat and a blazingly righteous lecture about the arrogant Imperial injustice of warding cats out of any part of Tel-Bastet.
Which would have caused its own cluster of difficulties, of course, but not the sort that left sorcerous claw-marks festering in his Highness’s soul.
And if Shai Vishal had truly never noticed his Highness’s wistful admiration, then the man was so utterly devoted to his God and his service that there was surely little room left for any other all-consuming passion.
He is devoted to his God, but he is not meek, Irfan thought, studying the perfect arrangement of blossoms in the floating bowl, and the way the incense smoke wavered with his breath.
I’ve seen Vishal’s passion. I’ve seen his desperation to feed our people after the great floods and droughts, when the waters had ruined the grain in too many storehouses or the spring harvest had not sufficed.
He would use any power under heaven to ensure that no one starves, when the floods and the locusts come and there aren’t enough protections even with his Highness’s foresights.
I understand why his Highness searches his rooms for anything he might ‘misplace’ at the Temple, whenever his foresight hasn’t been enough to avert the crisis. I am not sure Shai Vishal does, not entirely.
But if Irfan had ever tried to tell that solemn priest, who had once been Imperial and noble, of his Highness’s wistful longings when they had all been young…
Shai Vishal would not have believed him.
Why would his Highness’s loyal hajib betray such intimate thoughts?
There could not possibly have been a good reason for such a shattering of confidence — and Irfan himself had never had the years of foresight he would have needed to have seen the previous night’s complications so far in advance.
And whether or not he believed me, Vishal would have thought of the politics: why I would betray his Highness’ heart, who had sent me to do so, who would gain from either truth or falsehood.
And then if he is half as clever as I believe him to be, he would have used that leverage against me, and against the Empire I serve.
Is it worth giving a rival god’s High Priest such leverage over the Empire now, to see his Highness freed of the enchantment before anything worse may befall…?
The water in the bowl rippled. Irfan realized his clenched hands were trembling against the surface of his desk.
His Highness was …compromised.
Kamil could have been compromised as well.
Archivist Najra was at a minimum delighted by the chance to study the soul-binding’s effects upon his Highness, and at most had knowingly sent him to be infiltrated.
Influenced. When his Highness had struggled all his life to keep his independence amid a court full of smiling silk-robed vipers plying their dreams of influence, and now this one had power behind its pressures.
The guardians who tamed their sorcery to the God-Emperor’s service would not see ensorcellment as compromise, but they ferried freight and warded walls and purified water and sealed off cursed artifacts.
None of them were charged with the clarity of foresight necessary to guide the Empire itself through flood, famine, and cataclysm.
None of them were entrusted with the great secrets of state.
None of them even bothered to look into the tax records; but coin and knowledge were the fuel of the Empire, and some unknown sorcerer had attached a spying set of eyes to his Highness in the guise of a charming creature that purred.
Either his Highness had knowingly permitted it, or he had been compelled, and then made to believe that he had permitted it. This was precisely why charmcraft and ensorcellments of the soul had always been forbidden by the God-Emperor’s edicts.
Irfan couldn’t afford to give away leverage. But Shai Vishal was a scrupulously fair man.
Fair men were notoriously difficult to corrupt. But fair men could be swayed, if you could persuade them of your truth.
He would need a cypher. He couldn’t entrust any of this to bare ink in the hands of a courier who thought it nothing but royal whim. And he would need to embed the cypher in a sizable body of text.
Fortunately, he had every reason to cite extensive quantities of scripture in the making of his case.
Irfan stilled himself carefully, took a deep breath, and stepped in front of the mirror that hung on the back of his office’s door.
He shouldn’t have permitted himself such visible distress earlier, so much that Esmat had noticed; his jama was still askew and his hair much too disheveled.
He put himself sharply to rights, straightening the fabric, dampening his fingers in the lotus bowl to reshape the crisp curls of his hair and mustache, touching up the kohl rimming his eyes. Then he opened the door.
His junior scribe Fakhri waited in the desk nook a discreet distance down the hall; he set his pen down immediately, and bowed with a hand to his heart.
“Your Eminence, Kubra sent word that the priests will need access to your chambers for mischief-wardings, when your leisure permits it.”
“Thank you, Fakhri, but it may be some time before I dare dream of leisure,” Irfan said.
“Advise them to begin with the areas his Highness frequents. And ask in the scriptorium if we have any clean, unbound copies of The Pillars of the Sun, The Illumination of al-Hanif, and The Wisdom of Majada. I will need a copy of each.”
Fakhri blinked, but rallied valiantly. “If we don’t have them right now, your Eminence, we will have them by the evening meal. Sooner if I can manage it.”
“Thank you, Fakhri.”
The young man bowed again, then turned on his heel and dashed toward the scriptorium. Some other day, Irfan might have spoken to him about decorum, but… today, it was all he could do to see the door properly latched before he sank to his knees in front of his desk.
He had to admit, thinking the thoughts that he was presently thinking… if his Highness had foreseen what Irfan was on the verge of committing to paper, no wonder his Highness had never told him until after it was too late.
But if his Highness had chosen the future in which he knew his soul’s allegiance would be compromised…
Irfan cut a sharp edge onto his reed pen, reached for a fresh sheet of parchment, and began to write.