Chapter 14 Dreams, Omens, and Portents
Dreams, Omens, and Portents
FARAJ
Faraj was almost entirely certain he was dreaming, except that it was nothing like any dream he had ever had, nor anything like the shadow-and-starfire-flares of his foresights.
The world was blue-gray and hazy, and something was just wrong about the shape of everything.
And something had pinned him, or was squeezing, or…
Something needed to move, or to be moved.
Someone was snoring, or purring.
Tiny mews caught at his heart, and Faraj tried to wriggle further into the shadows, where everything was dark and safe and smelled comfortingly familiar, except that he was pinned, or squeezed, or something.
A khadim’s shriek startled him fully awake; Faraj yelped, flinched, and hit the back of his head against the underside of his bed’s mattress.
“Your Highness — what — why—?”
He couldn’t exactly call it sleep-walking if it had been sleep-crawling. And either way that seemed like an unfortunate thing to say to a distressed khadim who had just found him halfway under his bed and — Faraj tried to wriggle somewhat vainly — and very definitely stuck.
“Um,” Faraj said, “I’m terribly sorry to be a bother, but I don’t suppose you and Kamil might be able to lift the bed-frame a few inches?”
“I’ll go and bring the Chamberlain,” the khadim said, and fled before Faraj’s still sleep-muddled mind could find a more diplomatic thing to say than oh please don’t.
“Kamil?” he called, hopefully.
With a vast sigh, Kamil said, “I can lift you, shahzada. I can’t lift seven hundred pounds of carved marble and gold and ebony even if I tore off the mattresses and the draperies.”
“Could you pull on my ankles, though?”
“…Shahzada, the way I am built to pull involves sinking my claws in.”
“Could you try?” He didn’t want to have to say aloud how much he would endure to avoid Irfan finding him stuck like this.
Kamil’s hands were very warm, and yes, very sharp at the tips. He felt Kamil sink his claws into his night-clothes, and felt a huff of hot breath as he bit carefully into the waistline of his jama, and then Kamil’s back claws scrabbled ferociously for traction on the inlaid marble of the floor.
Something ripped, and Faraj felt a gust of air where there really oughtn’t have been a breeze.
“Uh,” Kamil mumbled around a mouthful of silk, with a ticklish flick of whiskers against Faraj’s suddenly-bare skin. He spat out the silk and said, “Sorry about that.”
“None of this is your fault,” Faraj said, trying not to sneeze on a ticklish dust-fluff that had brushed across his nose.
“I will make all the necessary apologies to the seamstresses and the khadimuna. Do you suppose, if I could get a rope or one of the sheets over my shoulder, if that might give a better grip… ?”
“I’ve still got no traction. Unless we can hook something through a jali, but if the stonework gives way… or your collarbone…”
It was difficult to sigh when your ribs were solidly pinned down by the edge of a marble-and-mahogany bed frame.
And while it was difficult to foresee in the darkness beneath the bed, he could imagine how badly breaking his collarbone or his ribs trying to escape a blunder-trap of his own making would be received, by not only his Chamberlain but also his physicians, his guard, and the soon-to-assemble priests of every faith in the civilized world at the Greater Convocation.
Kamil’s breath shifted to a soft rumble that was not at all a purr, and so Faraj could imagine the Chamberlain’s expression quite clearly even from the darkness under his bed.
“Will every day be like this?” the Chamberlain asked, wearily. “Will every morning be a race against the disruption of those little demonspawn, pulling you away from your duties to our faith and our work before the sun has even risen? I could scarcely imagine more effective agents of sabotage.”
“I thought that I heard kittens mewing?” Faraj ventured.
“That is my point,” the Chamberlain said sharply.
“If only one of them has disordered your sleep and disrupted your household before even the crack of dawn, and there will be half a dozen more at any time? You know how the priests of Maat will judge all of us. You know they will publicly question the God-Emperor’s fitness to rule if His own brother, His own prophet, cannot manage so simple and predictable a matter as daily prayers timed to a sun that we all know shall rise. ”
“Are you going to lecture him or are you going to help?” Kamil demanded.
“I don’t know how to help this! I don’t know how to help that every day one of our loyal khadimuna has come to me in distress or in outright terror at some predicament his Highness has found himself ensnared by, with the fear that he might have come to grief under our protection.”
“If you can’t figure out what to do about the fact that right now he’s wedged under the bed, then get out of my way while I fetch some hefty guards,” Kamil growled.
“That clearly doesn’t solve—”
“That solves the problem in front of me right now.” Kamil’s tail thumped irritably against Faraj’s ankles. “You can gnaw his ears off about the inquisition until they get here.” The warmth of him moved away, and Faraj briefly wished he could crawl all the way under the bed and just hide there.
“So where is the creature, if you brought it out for cosseting and it escaped your grasp?”
…that… sounded like Sahar was not in the jharokha either.
“I can’t see in the dark, Irfan,” Faraj said, as casually as he could manage under the circumstances.
“And it’s scratched you.” Faraj heard a soft splashing, like a cloth being wrung over a bowl, and then a startlingly cool wet pressure against the scratch-stings in his thigh. “Unless that was Kamil, in his ever-valiant efforts to save you from yourself.”
“It was my fault in either case, not either of theirs.”
“Your Highness, I have known you for years. You have never been like this before. You would not have been trapped crawling under your bed without that creature’s temptations to lunacy.”
“I cannot claim this situation to be the most pleasant of my unexpected adventures in new pet ownership,” Faraj admitted. “But I am happy to report there is no greater danger lurking beneath my bed than an unswept dust-bunny. And once the kittens are safely here…”
“Then what, your Highness?”
He had to admit he really couldn’t think of a soothing way to finish that sentence for his distressed Chamberlain.
Then there will be six or seven of them rather than one would not help.
Neither would then they can find even more interesting nooks to make even more challenging messes, or then I may be dreaming seven cats’ worth of under-the-furniture prowling-dreams rather than one.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the embarrassment of the Chamberlain’s interrogation was supplanted by the embarrassment of many well-armored figures clanging and chiming their way into his bedroom.
Kamil took irritable charge of who was to tilt the bed from one side, who was to steady it from the other, and who was to help Faraj out from under the bed frame without further knocking sense out of his clearly already-rattled head.
The moment he came clear, he could see the difference between the darkness under the bed and the darkness of the leering foresight-shadows tangled about the soldiers’ avid speculation about who would have been so brazen as to ride the God-Emperor’s brother under his bed, about the torn night-clothes and the cat-scratches and—
PRESSURE.
Faraj clutched at the bedpost because he could not clutch at his chest, or he would never again have a breath of freedom in the strangling grip of his devoted servants’ anxious, overbearing care. It wasn’t his heart, it wasn’t his—
it wasn’t his at all—
“—Your Highness!” Irfan and Kamil both had their arms around him, pushing and pulling in different directions. Kamil was much stronger, though, so his push to sit on the foot of the bed won out, and the strength of his concerned purring all but rattled Faraj’s teeth.
“Sorry,” he managed. What a scene to make in front of the guards’ avid eyes—
“Don’t apologize, lie down! I’ll find a physician,” Irfan said, but he couldn’t seem to let go of Faraj’s hands.
It was touching, and he would have thanked Irfan if he were not consumed by the overwhelming pressure of Sahar’s efforts to bear a kitten.
He couldn’t speak properly, and a groan would be even worse, and—
Lynx-tufted ears and a big velvet paw dug through his thoughts without a moment’s consideration for his privacy. Then something like flicking whiskers tickled the inside of his mind, along with a very vivid image of—
“My back,” Faraj gasped, clinging desperately to the excuse Kamil had offered when he’d recognized the overspill of Sahar’s body-sensations. “Not— not dangerous, just—”
One of the guardians choked on a half-stifled laugh, and Faraj was miserably certain he was imagining too-athletic sex and some odd fetish for being railed under the bed rather than over it.
Very carefully controlled, Irfan said, “Your Highness, believe me, I understand the importance of keeping your sigil securely in your possession at all times. But the next time it slips from your finger, please let one of us fetch it for you instead.”
His brief astonishment at Irfan’s offered shelter faded into the realization that of course the Chamberlain would steer the barracks gossip away from who could have had the audacity to roger their God-Emperor’s prophet under his bed.
(Faraj had worn that sigil-ring for so many years that he likely couldn’t have removed it without a jeweler’s saw… but the guardians probably didn’t know that.)
“Yes,” he managed, “yes, thank you—”
The squeezing relented with a rush, and he tried not to let it show too clearly.
“Thank you very much, Irfan,” he said, finding that he could breathe properly again. “And I am terribly sorry for all the fuss.”