Ali made a rule for himself regarding Farhad al-Khorasani.
The rule was simple. He would not think about Wazir-e-Ala after sunset which included whatever he was planning or his ill intentions of whatever rot he had seeded into the trade policies of Faras over the past seventeen years because that was a daytime problem.
It was a problem for the council and the Sultan and for Shehzade Ali who couldn't get past his footnotes and cross-referencing archives and was busy in putting correct pieces to his puzzle. At night, Ali was Al-Barez, and Al-Barez always takes matters into his own hands, matters that required specifics like Targets. Routes. And Direct Action.
Ali had broken his own rule approximately fourteen hours after the trade council meeting. It was not an emotional decision but rather a strategical one. He told himself this clearly and believed it with conviction. Farhad had been caught wrong-footed in that meeting, and a man like Farhad didn't take such incidents well. Ali was sure without a question that Wazir would make his move but the question was how quickly and in which direction. Ali loved to be informed about his enemies in advance and treated it as good practice.
Ali told himself that he would just observe but won't make his move yet. He crossed the rooftop of the silk merchant's warehouse on the eastern edge of the government quarter, three hours after the night watch had made its first circuit.
Farhad's private study was on the second floor of the Wazir's residence, which sat adjacent to the palace complex proper, connected by a covered walkway that guards patrolled on a forty minute rotation. The study's window faced an internal courtyard rather than the street, which made it private and less vulnerable to secret conversations as it was a measure to shield everything that happened within the residence from casual observation.
Ali descended into the courtyard on a rope made from braided cloth and wait in the shadow of the oleander hedge that ran along the eastern wall. The study was lit and through the latticed screen, Ali could make out the shape of Farhad seated at his desk with another shape seated across from him. The posture suggested a kind of deference that seemed professional rather than personal. The silhouette seemed like a subordinate who reported to Farhad.
The window screen was old cedar, and old cedar warped in the summer heat and contracted in the cool nights in ways that left gaps. Not large gaps. But Ali had learned a long time ago that you did not need a large gap. You needed a specific gap at a specific angle relative to the position of the people speaking inside. He found the right gap in approximately four minutes and settled his ear against the aged wood.
Farhad's voice came through clearly.
"I want to know which ones of the archived reports he accessed, when, and how long he spent with each one." A brief pause. "The archive keeper. Is he ours?"
The subordinate's voice was lower, requiring more concentration to follow. "Partially. He takes supplementary income from the Guild but he is not contracted. He can be managed."
"Manage him. I want a complete list by the end of the week. Every document the Shehzade has touched in the last year." Another pause, longer this time. "He quoted the maintenance records. Not the summary reports. The actual maintenance records. Those are filed under public works, subsection infrastructure, cross-indexed to the treasury allocation reports. Nobody cross-indexes public works to treasury allocation."
"Perhaps he was directed there by his tutor." suggested the subordinate.
"Kamran." Farhad mentioned the name the way you say the name of something you are deciding whether to keep it or remove it.
"Ustad Kamran has been the boy's tutor for eleven years. In eleven years he has not once appeared before this court, accepted a Guild invitation, or made a single political alignment that I can identify. He is either genuinely apolitical or he is very careful." Farhad addressed his subordinate followed by the sound of something being set on a desk.
"Find out which. I want his correspondence reviewed. Anything leaving his chambers in the last six months."
The subordinate murmured acknowledgment.
"The boy himself." Farhad's voice shifted slightly not becoming louder, but denser. "He has been in that palace for twenty years and I have managed him as a non-factor. I may have been imprecise." A brief silence. "A weak Rooh does not mean a weak mind. I allowed one to imply the other. That was sloppy."
Ali, in the courtyard below, was very still.
"He is still confined to the palace," the subordinate offered.
"He is confined to the palace during the day," Farhad half agreed. "I am less certain about the nights." The sound of papers being moved followed.
"Al-Barez has been operating in the government quarter for seven months. In seven months he has targeted eleven properties. Nine of those properties belong to men connected to the Guild's inner council. The other two belong to officials whose primary function is to obstruct the kind of cross-referencing between public works and treasury records that the Shehzade demonstrated today." Another silence, this one with weight in it. "That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern."
The subordinate said nothing. This was, Ali recognized, the correct response.
"I am not drawing a conclusion," Farhad continued. "I am noting a convergence that requires examination. Pull everything we have on Al-Barez. Every sighting report, every witness account, every description of height, build, movement pattern. Cross-reference it with what we know of the Shehzade's physical profile." A pause.
"Quietly. If I am wrong, I do not want to have been seen being wrong. If I am right, I do not want whoever is listening to know that I know."
The subordinate stood. Ali could hear the chair. "And if the cross-reference confirms it?"
Farhad was quiet for long enough that Ali counted eleven seconds.
"Then we will need to have a very careful conversation about the most elegant way to bring something to the Sultan's attention," he said. "Bahram al-Shirazi loves that boy in the way that men love things they are afraid of. That is a specific kind of love. It requires a specific kind of evidence to overcome."
The subordinate left. Ali heard the door. He heard Farhad return to his papers. He heard the scratch of a pen beginning to move.
He stayed in the shadow of the oleander hedge for another three minutes, making sure the rhythm of the study had settled back into something routine. Then he began the climb back up the courtyard wall, his mind running the numbers with the same quiet precision it ran everything.
Seven months. Eleven targets. Farhad had noticed the pattern seven months in. Ali had been running Al-Barez operations for last two years. Which meant for thirteen months he had been invisible, and for seven he had been slowly resolving into focus in the peripheral vision of the most dangerous man in Faras.
He needed to think about this. He needed to think about it carefully and without the particular brand of self-deception that had led him onto this rooftop tonight in the first place.
He pulled himself over the courtyard wall and onto the flat roof of the adjacent records building and stood for a moment in the cool night air, recalibrating.
That was when he saw her.
Or rather, when he saw it, A shape which wore the same black cloth, the same wrapped face, the same low silhouette moving across the roofline of the Wazir's residence with the practiced economy of someone who had done this before. Not Al-Barez's route. A different approach, coming from the western side of the building along an angle that Ali had assessed and dismissed three months ago as too exposed.
Whoever this was had found a way to make it work.
Ali went absolutely still. His first coherent thought, the one that arrived before the others, was that this was a trap set into motion that said Farhad had somehow anticipated him, placed a decoy, and he was about to watch his own approach strategy used against him.
His second thought, arriving half a second later as he studied the figure's movement more carefully, was that this was not a trap. Traps did not move like that. Traps moved with the slightly artificial precision of people performing a role. This moved with the unselfconscious efficiency of someone entirely focused on a problem that had nothing to do with Ali.
Whoever this was, they were not here because of him.
They were here for something else entirely.
He watched the figure descend from the roofline to the narrow ledge above the Wazir's private treasury which was a room Ali knew existed because it was the same archive that had given him the maintenance records that contained a property survey of the Wazir's residence commissioned eight years ago for reasons the survey itself did not explain.
The treasury was accessed through a concealed door in the study's lower floor. From the outside it had one ventilation grille, one drainage outlet, and a single shuttered window that had not been opened in the eight years since the survey.
The figure opened the shuttered window in under a minute.
Ali found himself moving before he had consciously decided to. Not towards them but parallel into a better angle. He crossed forty feet of rooftop in silence and settled into a crouch behind the low parapet at the roof's western edge, close enough now to see the figure clearly against the pale stone of the window frame.
The figure was small, compact and precise in the particular way that spoke of training rather than improvisation. The black wrapping was identical to his own in style but not in material which was finer, if he was reading the way it moved correctly. The hands, where they emerged from the cuffs to work the window latch, were not the hands he expected.
Ali simply etched this observation in his memory without yet drawing the conclusion it pointed towards. The figure slipped through the window and disappeared into the darkness of the treasury.
Ali settled in to wait. Two minutes. Perhaps three. Long enough to get to whatever they had come for and begin the return. He found himself running the geometry of the escape route they would need — window, ledge, roofline, western wall, the narrow alley below — and finding two problems in it that he was not sure they had accounted for.
At one minute and forty seconds, every lamp in the Wazir's residence came on simultaneously.
It wasn't gradually or sequentially moving through the corridors but all at once, as though the building had been holding its breath and suddenly exhaled in light. From somewhere below, from the direction of the treasury, Ali heard a sound he recognized from the property survey's footnotes which had mentioned a vibration alarm mechanism built into the treasury floor, a grid of pressure-sensitive tiles surrounding the central display case, designed specifically to trigger if weight was applied in the wrong sequence.
The wrong sequence.
Ali could hear the tapping sound of the boots that came from the guards moving fast from multiple directions, converging at a single place. The residence had come from sleep to full alert in under ten seconds which meant they had been sleeping ready, which meant Farhad had tightened his security sometime in the last twenty four hours, possibly in the last few hours, possibly immediately after a trade council meeting where something unexpected had happened.
Inside the treasury, behind the shuttered window that was now the only exit, was whoever had come for whatever Farhad kept in his private display case.
And they were out of time.
Ali looked at the window. He looked at the routes. He looked at the six places he could see guards already positioning and the two places he could not see but could calculate from the sound.
The window did not open from outside, and his fake doppelganger was completely surrounded and ready to die.