Temur pushed unleavened bread through salted oil, but hesitated with the dripping scrap poised over his plate. “You want to go before the caliph.”
Ato Tesefahun sipped coffee and made a satisfied noise. “Uthman Caliph is not without political liabilities of his own. It’s possible we could sell him a war as a solution to some of them. Especially if we can come up with an elaborate moral justification. As much as I hate to say it … blood ghosts will help.”
“The destruction of Kashe,” Samarkar said.
Ato Tesefahun nodded. His eyes flicked to the drawn, livid scar on Temur’s neck. “Which you have seen with your own eyes. And it will not hurt our case—excuse me, Temur—that my grandson bears the marks of hard fighting. You being a woman will present some difficulties, Samarkar-la, but you are a foreigner and a wizard. You will not be expected to behave as would a daughter of the Scholar-God. Still, we must consider our strategies.”
“I will wear a veil if I must,” said Samarkar. “It is not the first time I have made such concessions.”
Ato Tesefahun tipped his head at her. “Oh,” he said. “Not a veil, I think.”
* * *
No, not a veil.
What Ato Tesefahun produced from some deep of his storehouses was the battle armor of a Wizard of Tsarepheth—a coat of boiled leather dyed black as ink, the six-petaled skirt laid over chain mail that rustled and rang with each stride. It had been made for a man, but Samarkar was a large woman, and it did not fit too poorly—though the leather creaked with the expansion of her bosom at each breath. Samarkar felt like a martial wizard indeed, with the armored boots laced up to her thighs. But Ato Tesefahun’s true genius was apparent in the helm—black leather over steel, with a lacquered faceplate like the face of a snarling cat.
It hid everything but her eyes, which glared unnervingly from the shadows below the brim of the helm as she regarded herself in a looking glass bigger than any she’d seen outside a palace.
Ato Tesefahun, who had been adjusting the laces of her shoulder plates with his own hands, peered around her head for a look at the reflection. “There,” he said, smugly satisfied. “That will serve modesty.”
“Yes.” The helm made her voice echo with portent. And it hid it when Samarkar smiled with pleasure at the effect. “I dare say modesty will be served.”
* * *
It was a measure of Ato Tesefahun’s status in the court of Uthman Caliph, fourteenth of that dynastic name—not all of them related by blood—that he had sent the messenger requesting an audience with sunrise and that reply returned before he, Temur, Samarkar, and Hsiung had finished lunch. It happened to return simultaneously with Hrahima, Ato Tesefahun’s Cho-tse ally who had accompanied Samarkar and Temur from Tsarepheth.
The Temur of the previous winter would not have believed he could feel so relieved—so encouraged—to see a doorway filled upright to upright with the massive shoulders of a tiger who went on two legs. But he had come to rely on Hrahima, to trust her—and her absence had been more of a worry than he’d realized until she returned.
She had let the messenger with his note enter first. Now, while Ato Tesefahun read it, she paused in the shade of the awning beyond the door and, with a damp cloth brought to her by one of Ato Tesefahun’s men, sponged away the red road dust obscuring the char-colored stripes on her feet and lower legs.
Temur rose to meet her, glancing at his grandfather for permission before filling a drinking bowl with water.
“You’re a Khagan in waiting,” Ato Tesefahun said.
Temur could not miss the paternal warmth in his tone. It sparked a heartache that Temur, fatherless, did not know how to control.
“And you are my grandson. The hospitality of my house is yours to share. Especially when you’re sharing it with my friend.”
Hrahima, ducking beneath the lintel, chuffed: a tiger’s laugh, laying her whiskers along the sides of her muzzle and revealing streaked, yellowed teeth.
“Employee,” she argued, accepting the water.
Temur wanted to ask where she had been, and on what errand—but if Ato Tesefahun would not share the information, Hrahima was unlikely to undermine him.
She drank from the cup like a woman, except she curled up her lip and poured the water into herself rather than sipping. When it was empty, she handed it back to Temur with a nod. “Samarkar, Temur, Hsiung—well met. What news?”
Her gesture took in the scroll ribboned in the Uthman Caliph’s personal and imperial colors of crimson and indigo that Ato Tesefahun was carefully cracking open with his thumbs.
“We are invited to present ourselves before Uthman Caliph in the third hour after sunrise, tomorrow,” he said. “We are advised that this will be a private rather than an open court.”