The city of Shiraz did not sleep.
Even past the third hour of night, the capital of Faras breathed with lanterns still burning in the tea houses, the merchants still arguing over the last dregs of the day's deals, the night watchmen still dragging their boots across the cobblestones of the merchant quarter. The city was old and vain and never quite willing to admit that the day was over.
On the rooftops, though, it was a different world entirely.
Ali moved across the terracotta tiles like water finding the path to flow freely — low, fast, and silent. His sandals had been stripped and tied at his back an hour ago. His bare feet were better up here, as he believed you felt the loose tiles before you committed your weight to them. You felt the edge of a rooftop before the darkness swallowed it. Pain was like information to him and scars left by the wounds were like experience.
He stopped at the lip of a three-story drop and crouched, pulling the black wrap tighter across the lower half of his face to keep it from showing. Below him, torchlight spilled from the courtyard of Wazir Farhad al-Khorasani's estate. Two guards stood at the gate while two more patrolled the inner perimeter. The wazir himself had retired hours ago and Ali had watched his chamber lamp go dark from the minaret across the street.
He studied the guards. Their rhythm. The slight delay in the northern man's step which felt like a bad knee, probably an old wound. The southern guard kept glancing toward the gate house every fourth circuit, where the smell of cardamom tea drifted out into the cold night air.
Twelve seconds. That was the window between the southern guard's glance toward the tea and his return focus to the yard. Twelve seconds to drop, cross the shadow of the fig tree, reach the eastern wall of the main building, and begin the climb.
Ali breathed out slowly and dropped.
— ✦ —
Wazir Farhad al-Khorasani was not a man the city mourned.
The merchants of the lower quarter knew his name the way they knew a bad winter which was something to be endured, worked around, and cursed under the breath. For seven years he had sat at the right hand of Sultan Bahram al-Shirazi, collecting taxes that were never recorded, seizing properties through debts that were never explained, and filling warehouses that were never inspected. Seven years of slow bleeding dressed up as governance. He was a man whom the Sultan trusted the most and couldn't hear a word about.
The people complained. The people always complained. But complaints needed a destination, and the Sultan's court had long since sealed its doors to voices from the lower quarter as everything was under the control of Wazir-e-Ala.
So, Ali had found another way.
The study window was unlatched as he had paid a kitchen servant three silver dirhams to ensure three nights ago. He slipped through it like smoke, landing in a crouch on the tiled floor, and paused. The room smelled of ink, cedar wood, and the particular sour sweetness of a man who drank too much expensive wine. Moonlight cut through the latticed window screen, laying broken geometric patterns across stacked ledgers and sealed correspondence.
Ali moved to the desk first. He was not here for gold. Gold was heavy, traceable, and satisfying only to a certain kind of thief. But Ali was a different kind.
He found what he was looking for in the third drawer of a wooden Almirah. A bound ledger, its cover stamped with the official seal of the Shiraz tax authority, its pages filled with numbers that did not match the numbers filed at the treasury. Two sets of accounts. Two different realities living side by side in the same ink.
He tucked it under his arm and moved to the iron chest behind the false panel in the northern wall, which the same three-dirham servant had described in considerable detail. Inside: a leather sack of gold, three merchant seals that did not belong to Farhad, and a smaller pouch of cut gemstones that had no business being in a government official's private study.
Ali took the gold and the ledger. He left the seals and the gemstones. Evidence had to be left for the right people to find. He was not here to erase the man's crimes. He was here to eventually expose them.
— ✦ —
Ali was over the outer wall and three rooftops away before the southern guard finished his tea.
In the lower quarter, in the hour before the Fajr prayer called the city back to life, the streets ran narrow and familiar. Ali descended through a crumbling stairwell behind a tanner's shop, stripped the black wrap from his face and bundled it into the satchel alongside Farhad's ledger, and became in the span of thirty seconds something unremarkable — a young man in a plain grey dishdasha, walking with the slightly dazed look of someone who had been up too long.
He found the widow Farida's house by memory, knocked three times in the particular pattern she recognized, and waited for a response.
She opened the door the width of one eye, saw him, and opened it wider. She was perhaps sixty, perhaps older, her hair wrapped in a faded blue cloth, her face carrying the particular exhaustion of a woman who had outlived most of her options. Behind her in the single room, five children of various sizes were asleep on a single mat.
Ali held out the leather sack without speaking.
Farida stared at it. Her jaw tightened in a way that had nothing to do with gratitude and everything to do with the particular pride of a woman who had not asked for this and was not sure she could afford to refuse it.
"The man it came from has three warehouses full of grain that should have been distributed to the lower quarter last winter," Ali said quietly. "This is less than a tenth of what he owes you. It is not charity. It is a debt being partially repaid."
She took the sack. She did not say thank you and he did not expect her to.
He was back on the rooftops heading east before the door closed behind him.
— ✦ —
The palace of Sultan Bahram al-Shirazi sat on the high ground of Shiraz the way all palaces did it was as if the earth itself had decided that certain people deserved to look down at everyone else. Its walls were pale sandstone that turned amber in the sunrise, its gardens visible from the lower city as a controlled stripe of green against the morning dust. Beautiful. Distant. Entirely otherworldly.
Ali had learned its rhythms the way you learn the rhythms of any cage it was not with resentment, but with the precision of someone who intends eventually to walk out of it unnoticed.
The eastern servant's passage, the one used before dawn by the kitchen staff bringing bread from the outer bakeries, had a guard rotation that reset every two hours. The third guard of the night shift was a man named Hormuz who had been working at the same post for eleven years and had long since stopped actually looking at the faces of the people walking past him with bread baskets. Ali had tested this theory before for six times and it had successfully worked six times.
He picked up the basket full of breads that he had stashed behind the garden wall three hours earlier, settled it under his arm, walked past Hormuz with his head down, and was successfully inside.
Seventeen minutes later, Ali was in his chambers. He didn't waste any time for getting cleaned up and got changed before anyone took notice of him. The satchel was kept hidden behind the loose stone in the eastern wall that the palace architect had, for reasons and Ali had never understood, simply left there.
He sat on the edge of his royal teak wood bed and looked at his hands in the grey pre-dawn light. A small cut across the left palm from a roof tile he had misjudged. He pressed his thumb against it absently.
On his right wrist, just below where his pulse beat, was the mark.
He had carried it since birth — a small dark sigil, no larger than a thumbnail, that the palace physicians had spent years debating and ultimately left its mystery unsolved under the category of unusual birthmarks and forgotten about. The mark did not hurt. It did not glow or pulse or behave in any manner that invited further examination. It was simply there, faintly visible, like a word written in a language nobody around him could read.
Ali had long since stopped thinking about it.
He lay back and closed his eyes. In four hours the palace would stir. His tutor Ustad Kamran would arrive expecting him to have reviewed the trade law texts from the previous day. The head of the royal kitchen would send breakfast that he was expected to eat in dignified solitude. The world of Shehzade Ali al-Shirazi who was weak-Roohed, fragile, confined, pitied, would resume its ordinary performance.
He allowed himself exactly the ghost of a smile.
Somewhere in the lower quarter of Shiraz, a widow named Farida was counting gold coins in the dark while her grandchildren slept. Somewhere in a government official's study, a hidden ledger now had a companion ledger missing from beside it — a gap that would take days to notice and longer to explain. Somewhere in the city's tea houses and market stalls, the story of Al-Barez was already threading its way into conversation the way all good stories did — quietly, persistently, building towards something.
Shehzade Ali al-Shirazi in twentieth year of his life, with a weak Rooh, palace-confined, and officially unremarkable, closed his eyes and slept.
He did not dream. He never dreamed.
Not yet.