Chapter 9 The High Priest’s Penance #6
When his shift ended after the sunset and he discovered that al-Sadiq had sent two more missives while Vishal stirred the cauldrons, that lever to influence the path of the Empire began to look less like a gift and more like a curse.
The hajib had apparently found some poor scribe with a clear hand and tasked that unfortunate soul with copying out all the holy writs and priestly commentaries that could be used to support his own position on…
whatever this astonishing debate would prove to be about.
The third missive was substantial. At least sixty pages of notes — Shai Vishal flipped through, and amended his thoughts: At least sixty pages of annotated notes.
Someone had found a pot of vermilion paint to underscore and outline the salient points with.
False gods, false worship, necromancy, demons, compulsions, more falsity… what had any of this to do with either a bath-house courtesan or a cat…? And why were so many words not just underlined in red, but also overlined or boxed or dotted…
Ah, five hells, Shai Vishal thought. Al-Sadiq sent me a cypher.
Without sending a key, because that would have been too convenient.
I don’t know whether I should be flattered by his estimate of my intellect or outraged that he thinks I have nothing more valuable to do with my time.
There are barely two weeks before the Greater Convocation of every faith in the Empire, but of course a quibble of specifically Imperial theology is the most critical matter in anyone’s world.
Rubbing his temples, Shai Vishal set the stack aside and took the shahzada’s simple note out of the drawer.
His Highness hadn’t signed it, of course, but he hadn’t needed to; Shai Vishal was nearly as familiar with the shahzada’s handwriting as his own, after so many years mediating the Council of the Divines and the Greater Convocations.
The phrasing echoed young Asharan’s concerns eerily well, but of course his Highness had always been a touch uncanny that way, even if Vishal hadn’t already guessed their connection.
Your Reverence,
I’m so sorry I couldn’t warn you.
I am almost entirely sure I owe penance, and yet I cannot regret a single moment of it.
…Well. I do regret how very many pages of thundering scripture Irfan is about to send you. I would lighten that burden for you if I could, but it would be improper of me to intervene, would it not? He has the right to make his case, as I have the right to make my sweet Sahar’s case.
She is a soft, warm, velveted, purring delight, one of several delights I had never dared to dream I might have for my own. I have found my dreams more daring of late, and I am truly very sorry for the trouble, but I will not regret the joy that brought her to my hands.
(And after speaking to Asharan, suddenly the second layer behind those words leapt out at Shai Vishal much more clearly.)
I would not presume to defend my own actions. I would submit myself willingly to any penance you consider meet; I trust your judgment without reserve.
Although I will not defend my own actions, I do beg your compassion and mercy for Sahar’s own sake, and for her kittens.
They are blameless in all this, and vulnerable to the powers of the realms, and I pray your god’s generous and compassionate hand can shelter them from the storms of power that swirl around my name.
I am sure Irfan will call upon the name you once held, to fit an aged key back into the lock of propriety. I call upon the name you hold now, Upaja’s High Priest in Bastet’s own Temple, here in the city of the cats.
If you judge that punishment is necessary, let me take it upon myself.
His Highness had often been given to flights of poetry, but something about the analogy of the key and the lock had Vishal blinking in belated realization.
His family had not named him Vishal when he was born to an Imperial noble family near the God-Emperor’s Summer Capital. But Irfan bir Enayat al-Sadiq, the hajib of the shahzada Nur-ul-Shuruq Faraj al-Nadhir, knew the name Vishal had been born to, and…
Damn it. Yes.
That long-discarded name unlocked the pattern of the cypher when he paired the letters to the patterning of the outlines in the order of a sundial’s clockwise sweep across the hours of a day.
As the judge whose neutrality was paramount, he could not be too grateful to the shahzada for tipping his hand.
But Shai Vishal also knew that, as distracted as he was by the mathematics of the daily work of the cauldrons, he would have needed days or weeks to work out the cypher’s pattern without his Highness’s hint.
His Highness could have left that sentence unspoken, and he could have gained a considerable advantage in the inquiry.
But he had said it himself, that he would lighten Vishal’s burden if he could. And that it would be improper of him to intervene.
For all that Shai Vishal had walked away from the God-Emperor’s religion and the God-Emperor’s court, he had always found the God-Emperor’s brother to be a trustworthy and admirable man.
He had also found the same to be true of his Highness’s hajib.
He had never heard of the two of them being set at such drastic odds with each other before.
And anyone who had spent enough time in the inner circle of the God-Emperor’s court knew not to be surprised by the elder brothers’ sexual enthusiasms. It would be beyond hypocritical for al-Sadiq to lose his wits that his own shahzada had spent a night with a courtesan for what was most likely the first sexual rebellion of his anxiously dutiful and foresightful life.
Al-Sadiq had never been a hypocrite, even if he was too fond of clever puzzles, so what under heaven had he hidden in that cypher…
…oh.
It wasn’t just a cat. It was a cat familiar.
Meaning the problem wasn’t the consorting with a courtesan, but the consorting with a mage. Who had bound the God-Emperor’s brother’s soul to a cat-spirit.
In Tel-Bastet, the city of the cats, where Bastet claimed Her dominion over Her children and their purring incarnations regardless of the God-Emperor’s opinion on the matter.
Shai Vishal wondered if it was too late in the evening to catch Asharan in his bath-house, drag him into a quiet corner, and shake him by the shoulders while shouting What in five hells were you thinking?
Most likely, he hadn’t been thinking. Most likely, he’d been feeling: that the shahzada was lonely, that cats were delightful, and that a touch of magic would bond the shahzada to a particular cat-spirit in ways more stubbornly persistent than an alley-stray who could be more easily turned aside at the gates of the fortress.
…No, honestly, Vishal doubted that the impulsive young man would have thought of anything beyond the fact that cats were delightful. Clearly the shahzada had never had one, and clearly everyone in Tel-Bastet ought to be owned by at least one cat.
Unless, of course, they were a high-ranking Imperial with secrets of state to keep behind their eyes and prophecies that might rock the Empire, now soul-bonded to a small, new-made, vulnerable creature far easier to kidnap or threaten than the shahzada himself.
No wonder his Highness had apologized so many times in that note.
And no wonder al-Sadiq was having well-bred hysterics.
Al-Sadiq hadn’t known Asharan for the past twenty years.
Al-Sadiq had no reason to think an unknown Catsprowl enchanter to be anything but a power-hungry opportunist, sinking charms and influence into the soul of the God-Emperor’s brother.
But Vishal couldn’t simply tell the hajib that.
Not without revealing why he trusted a back-alley enchanter whose name shouldn’t cross the Imperial gates any more than Faraj’s should be bandied about in the Catsprowl.
There was no way through that conversation which didn’t involve “I have known him for most of his life,” which led towards “he is a common-born Basteti bath-house courtesan and a charmcrafter, and even if I do not expose his name to the gossip-grinding of the entire Empire, you are clever enough to have your people track him down if I let the slightest hint slip. And yes he could choose to bewitch a prince if he wished. And I ask you to blindly trust me, with neither reason nor tangible evidence, when I claim that I personally don’t believe he would have. ”
None of them had been that naive for many, many years, not in the circles of power that they shared. That defense could not possibly stand on its own.
Vishal himself wouldn’t have trusted such a tale if one of the courtiers had asked him to simply trust that a secret physician’s newly compounded tincture was merely a healthful headache remedy for his Highness, and not sent by his rivals or tampered with by fortune-seekers.
Somehow, they had to separate the question of the enchanter’s purpose from the fact of the cat-familiar’s existence.
If he had been twenty years younger, Shai Vishal might have beaten his forehead against the desk to see if one headache could drown out another. Twenty years of experimentation had confirmed that it simply compounded both the headaches.
Still, the thought of retiring and turning all these headaches over to Shai Madhur…
…no, Shai Madhur did not deserve to be handed these headaches either.
And Shai Madhur would immediately have chosen in favor of the sweet soft little cat, without considering the implications for the balance of power in the Empire, or the question of dominance among the gods, or even what fees he should require on behalf of the Temple and the community cauldrons when both of the men involved were independently wealthy.
Asharan had come to Shai Vishal rather than Shai Madhur for judgment, and he had done so for a reason.
His Highness had also come to Shai Vishal for judgment.
…If only al-Sadiq had not felt quite so compelled to bolster his case with sixty pages of cypher embedded in scripture.
If only his Highness had offered more than the key to al-Sadiq’s cypher. If only he had offered any work of law, scripture, or precedent in his own defense…
Except that he couldn’t, could he? Because he was the God-Emperor’s brother and a prophet, and his Highness knew how the power he held so carefully could be misused with a few implications too many. And because, in the eyes of the God-Emperor’s priesthood, surely there was no defense.
Bastards and love affairs were nearly expected from wayward royal kinsmen. Mage-wrought soul-bonds to a cat-spirit so clearly of another goddess’s domain, though… that was most likely unprecedented among the God-Emperor’s prophets and priests.
A cat mewed and scratched at the outside of the mashrabiya screen.
Shai Vishal considered discretion for a moment, then decided there was no way a Temple cat would be able to puzzle out a cypher keyed to a name he hadn’t used for decades.
He unlatched the screen, and the cat immediately leapt through onto his desk.
It was a big tawny tom, but after a wary sniff at the ink smudges on his fingertips, he arched his back into Vishal’s hand, purring quietly but so deeply Vishal might have mistaken it for a thunderstorm in another season.
Vishal was going to have to ask the Archmage, wasn’t he. Because nothing in the God-Emperor’s holy writ would ever defend sorcery like this. His Highness could not make an appeal to the tenets of his faith when his faith held no defense for him.
And the High Priestess of Bastet would be far too delighted by the opportunity to make the Imperials squirm about whether the human owned the cat or the cat owned the human, when the human in question was the God-Emperor’s own prophet.
To say nothing of the Priests of the Assessors of Maat, or any number of priests arriving for the Greater Convocation who would salivate at a chance like this.
That left the Archmage, who was the sharp-clawed shelter for many a wayward young mage who had run afoul of some priest or some Imperial.
(There was some irony that the new mage in question was new only in terms of his art, and Imperial and powerful enough that she would usually have taken any other side in such a debate.)
Vishal would have to be very, very careful with his asking.
The Archmage would be just as delighted to make the Imperials squirm as Bastet’s High Priestess.
But at least she would not gossip with priests or Imperial nobles about any leverage she could seize for her own.
For all that she was catfolk, she hoarded her knowledge like a dragon.
And he was about to need to pry just enough of that knowledge out of her claws.
Without letting her guess why. Without getting her so curious that her nose for secrets honed in on why Upaja’s High Priest would ask her such a thing, on behalf of a nameless new mage whose presence she had not already noticed for herself, but who had somehow gotten himself in enough trouble to upset the Empire.
…Which he also couldn’t tell her, could he.
He couldn’t ask the Archmage. Shai Vishal was a clever wordsmith, his practice honed by years of both courtly rhetoric and priesthood. But the Archmage was catfolk, and a power who respected no God but herself.
But any trial, any judgment, held two sides to the tale. If his Highness would provide no defense for himself…
Finding some discreet way to defend a man who could not defend himself, without compromising Vishal’s own need for a priest-judge’s serene neutrality, within the fortnight before the Greater Convocation consumed his every waking minute? This mess was going to be so damned complicated.
Shai Vishal sighed, poured another measure of oil into the lamp on his desk, wished for a measure of araq for his cup, and wrote on a piece of parchment, Give me three days. He folded it, sealed it with a blob of wax, and set it on the corner of his desk to send up to the haveli in the morning.
The cat’s eyes reflected the gold of the lamp-flames, still purring deeply as Vishal scratched behind his lynx-tufted ears.