Chapter 14 Dreams, Omens, and Portents #3
As the turning carriage-wheels bumped and jostled them down the road from the fortress to the river plain, Faraj took refuge in bland chatter about the intricacies of the Ministry of Finance’s tax assessments, fully expecting to see the priests’ eyes glaze over.
But the youngest one actually leaned in, asking detailed questions about comparative valuations and loss estimates.
Faraj felt quite a surprise to discover a truly interested audience — and when he began tentatively to explain his hypothesis about the estimable financial value of disaster aversion through a touch of prophecy, both of the order-priests lit up in eager enthusiasm.
Watching Kamil and Irfan silently commiserate with a single glance was entertaining in its own way; if his Chamberlain could have flicked ears or whiskers, he would have.
Faraj would gladly have spent the day up to his elbows in books of tax law analyzing what percentage of the past forty years worth of post-fire or flood or infrastructure failure’s cleanups and repairs might have been averted with warnings a few steps further upstream than his own disaster-prophecies.
It would have been much less stressful… well, at least for him, though he understood his interests in both disaster prevention and financial recalibrations were not always shared.
He did truly appreciate the young priests’ devotion to the value of Order.
He admired their insistence that worldly power and influence could not be permitted to disorder the fair and just distribution of the fruits of the Empire’s labor, for the good of the Empire’s people and gods alike.
In that goal, they were entirely in accord with each other.
He wished the Convocation might have happened a month earlier than the night of his dreams, so that he could have spoken with them with a clearer, deception-free conscience.
In everything but his affection for his softly purring little demon of chaos incarnate, he did find more in common with the young order-priests than he’d expected.
At least until they came to the Council’s private entrance to Bastet’s sanctuary, and Faraj caught his first glimpse of how Shai Vishal had chosen to express his displeasure with the situation.
On any other day, if Shai Vishal had not bothered to change a smoke-smudged and haldi-stained priest’s wrap after his shift at the cauldrons, Faraj would have taken it as a silent comment upon the relative importance of Imperial pomp and circumstance, in which Shai Vishal ranked Imperial politics somewhere well below his personal service to the poor and hungry of Tel-Bastet.
Faraj would have felt the sting of the rebuke and been humbled, as Irfan would have felt the sting of the rebuke and become indignant.
On a day when the Priests of the Assessors of Maat had sent auditors whom Faraj was attempting to divert from the secret inquisition about a prophet’s soul-binding to a chaos-spirit given flesh, under cover of a ruse about the monthly tax day that he had not had the chance to warn Shai Vishal about—
He barely had a moment to wonder if his foresights were too overwhelmed by the full array of new potential disasters in his life and this one had just slipped past his mind’s eye, when Irfan said in a crisp high court dialect, “Your Reverence, the Priests of the Assessors of Maat intend to supervise our reconciliation of the monthly donation ledgers. I do apologize for the unexpected disruption.”
“I see,” Shai Vishal said, in the common tongue of the Basteti streets, as utterly neutral as Irfan was pointed.
The youngest of them bit his lip at the thought that their zeal had also disrupted someone else’s Order.
Faraj might have had more sympathy for a young priest’s first encounter with Irfan and Vishal’s sharply pointed propriety if the priests hadn’t been so insistent on reading dire omens of the fate of the empire into one pain-staggered prayer of devotion and one polite fiction about a dropped ring.
He supposed that people without his own literal visions of impending troubles must feel the need to grasp at whatever straws of forecasting they could conjure up from fevered imaginations.
But at some point before the Greater Convocation ended, he really ought to take them both aside and gently explain that the world held quite enough actual looming disasters without reckoning fateful portents into dropped baubles and spilled cups and a scuff of dust marring the orderly pattern of a mosaic floor.
As an actual nadhir prophet, he thought he had the standing to advise them that not every omen was always of doom, and sometimes it was not even an omen.
But then, if they had uncovered his purring heresies by that point, they might be disinclined to accept a guilt-haunted man’s advice to be less stringent in their seeking of evidence.
“Should I have a word with the Temple acolytes, to ask after a suitable study room with additional desks and chairs?” Irfan asked, following Shai Vishal’s shift in language smoothly.
“No need,” Shai Vishal said. “A woman of the community has come to me with a crisis of faith, and the monthly calculations can wait. But I believe a private word of comfort from the God-Emperor’s own prophet may go some way toward soothing her soul.
Perhaps our visitors would enjoy a tour of the Temple storerooms in the meantime. ”
“Are you forbidding us from observing you?” the slightly-elder of the two Priests of the Assessors said, shocked.
Dryly, Shai Vishal said, “If you prefer to be forbidden than to have the grace to step aside in a private matter of the heart, young ones, then certainly I will forbid you as you wish.”
“I had not thought you would support chaos and disruption, your Reverence!”
“I do not,” he agreed. “That is why I ask you to step aside, rather than to further disrupt my ministry to my community. Fold some broadleaf bowls. Play with some kittens. Wait your turn.”
“Order stands above all,” the youngest one said, aghast. “Order must stand above all, or else—”
Of course that was the moment that Sahar felt the imperative pressure of her next kitten. The cane was just a single slender, wobbly stick, and Faraj’s knees were not going to hold him up.
One of the young priests began shouting about the irregularity and the chaos and the deception while Kamil scooped him into his arms and snarled.
The Chamberlain fluttered about like a startled dove, trying to soothe the flaring tempers and brush the hostilities aside while desperately distracted by his own concern.
“This is far beyond chaos, this is conspiracy!” the elder cried. “For you to hide the infirmity of the God-Emperor’s prophet and however many cracks you conceal in the foundation of the Empire itself—”
It was rare for Shai Vishal to raise his voice, but when he needed to, he would.
“Children,” he said, “you are much too young to understand age. When you are old and fat and exhausted and your body creaks with every step, talk to me again about how only a physically perfect specimen has the right to embody your idealized order. In the meantime, listen to the wisdom that age and pain and endurance have brought his Highness and myself, and let the man rest.”
“But if the God-Emperor’s own brother is ill and infirm, what of the God-Emperor Himself? What right to claim flawless dominion—”
“The God-Emperor is perfect beyond perfection,” the Chamberlain told them, with the unshaken blaze of pure faith shining in his eyes.
“The God-Emperor is inevitably Himself. But should you wish to inspect the flawlessness of God-Emperor’s perfection with your own eyes, I will be more than glad to arrange for your transportation to the Summer Palace.
Now, your Highness, we must find a quiet place to—”
Hands clenched at his sides, the youngest one declared, “In the name of Maat, in the name of Order, and in the name of Truth, I demand—”
Even through the difficulty of Sahar’s exertions, Faraj flinched when Shai Vishal threw his head back and laughed.
“You demand? You? In the Temple of Bastet, who delights in mischief? Beneath the eye of the High Priest of Upaja, who holds that imperfection is proof of humanity? Go away, children. Come back tomorrow. Then I will count for you as many sacks of wheat as you wish to watch me count.”
“What’s all this fuss?” Shai Nanda asked, stepping in through the door from the sanctuary. “Vishal, I thought you were going to attend to that angry woman in the library.”
“I would gladly do so as soon as these yapping puppies sit down.”
Shai Nanda was not whom Faraj would have chosen to escort priests of Order, because she was born with an instinct for mischief that made her right at home in Bastet’s Temple. “Counting the wheat, you said?”
“They seem most concerned with the order of our warehouse,” Shai Vishal agreed.
“Come on then, boys. We’ve just gotten a new donation of wheat. We can count every single grain.” And she seized both of them by the elbows and hauled them away, despite their increasingly indignant protests.
The moment the door closed behind them, Irfan’s poised facade shattered; he dashed to Kamil’s side, caught Faraj’s hand in his own, and pressed his palm to Faraj’s chest without even the pretense of tending to a stray mote of dust on his silks.
“Your Highness,” he murmured, and his voice shook. “This isn’t your back, or your knees. Your heart is pounding. Please. Tell me what’s truly wrong.”
Faraj squeezed his hand, but he didn’t dare try to speak. Gasping pain in his voice would have worried them further, and what could he say that wasn’t…
“It’s that creature, isn’t it,” Irfan said. “This is why it’s too dangerous. Your heart—”
The pressure released abruptly, and Faraj couldn’t help a gasp of relief. “It’s all right,” he said, the moment he trusted his voice. “I’m fine. She’s fine. She’s just… occupied.”
“Where is the creature? What is it doing to you?”
“Might I catch my breath…?”
He truly wasn’t sure how much of the heart-pounding distress was reflected from Sahar and how much was the overwhelming fear of the inquisition, of how desperately he needed to defend her and how little but love alone he could cite in her defense.
Kamil’s quiet, watchful strength was a comfort to every fear but this one.
He hadn’t dared look into this day, or beyond it, for fear of what he would foresee.
Kamil said to Shai Vishal, “Is there somewhere quiet I can watch over the shahzada while you see to your congregant in the library?”
“Come to the library,” Shai Vishal said. “Some matters will become more clear.”
Kamil huffed his opinion of that vigorously enough to ruffle Faraj’s hair.
But he padded silently behind Shai Vishal’s footsteps, carried Faraj across the threshold of a familiar room, and stopped short even as Faraj’s ears popped at the sudden pressure-shift of some unexpectedly sharply crackling scry-wards.
Magical wards, in the heart of the Temple of Bastet.
Najra looked up from amid piles and piles of books heaped on the study table and the floor around her in every direction. She said, “Oh, good. I’ve almost finished drawing the diagrams.”
“Oh dear,” Faraj said.