Part Four — What the Robe Actually Does · Adam's Robe Book 1
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alborz Range, Iran — Present Day
Rostami found him on the compound's south terrace, reviewing the following night's security rotation for the fourth time since breakfast, and said the thing he had plainly come to say without any of the softening Nassiri had come to expect from him across three weeks of shared travel.
"The garment needs to leave your custody tonight."
Nassiri did not look up from the tablet immediately, because looking up immediately would have told Rostami exactly how much the sentence had cost him to hear calmly. "Explain that to me as though I have not spent six weeks building a security posture specifically designed to prevent that sentence from ever being said to me."
"It requires preparation. Washing. A vigil, kept by clergy alone, the night before it's placed on anyone — this isn't invention, Colonel, it's the oldest requirement attached to every investiture tradition I've been able to trace, going back further than either of us can comfortably discuss. A khil'a bestowed without the proper vigil isn't simply a lesser version of the same ceremony. In every tradition I've studied, it's understood to not fully take at all — the authority conferred is incomplete, contested, vulnerable in exactly the way tomorrow cannot afford to be vulnerable." Rostami said it without heat, the same flat certainty Nassiri had watched harden in him since the wadi, since February, since a hunting-ground bomb had fired half a second early for reasons neither of them had ever fully settled between themselves. "I am not asking you to trust the tradition, Colonel. I am asking you to trust that four hundred officers who have spent this war learning to doubt everything will doubt this too, the instant they sense it was assembled in haste rather than done properly."
"And where, precisely, does 'done properly' require it to spend the night."
"The old chapel wing. West end of the original garrison, the part your construction crews haven't touched because nobody building a command bunker had any use for a prayer room." Rostami said it simply, as though the location were the least significant part of what he was asking. "One door. No windows that open. I will keep the vigil myself, with two junior clerics I trust completely, and I am asking you to post exactly as many armed men outside that door as you believe the building's single entrance actually requires — not the forty you currently have wrapped around the central hall, because forty armed men standing vigil outside a chapel is not reverence, Colonel, it is a checkpoint, and it will read as one to every man who walks past it tomorrow already primed to doubt."
Nassiri set the tablet down, finally, and looked at him directly, because there were conversations a man owed another man his full attention for even when — especially when — he intended to lose the argument. "Two nights ago a hunting-ground bomb went off half a second early and killed two of my men instead of me. I do not currently know who planted it, or who told them where to plant it, and you are asking me to voluntarily reduce the object this entire war now turns on to a single unarmored door and six rifles."
"I am asking you to trust that the same instinct that has kept you alive through eleven months of a war that has killed better men than either of us might, for one night, be wrong about what actually keeps this particular thing safe." Rostami's voice didn't rise. It never rose anymore, Nassiri had noticed, somewhere around the wadi; it had found a register that didn't need to. "You have spent six weeks protecting it the way you protect anything — control, force, redundancy. I am telling you, as the one man in this compound who has spent considerably longer than six weeks actually studying what this object is, that the thing which has kept it safe for fourteen centuries was never any of that. It was people willing to treat it as something other than an asset to be secured. I would like tomorrow's ceremony to work, Colonel. I suspect, though I recognize you will resist hearing it this way, that it is more likely to work if tonight looks less like your war and more like what it actually is."
The call from Tehran came four hours later, and Nassiri understood, from the specific careful formality of the voice on the other end of it, that this was not a request he was actually being given room to refuse. Someone considerably senior to either of them had already heard Rostami's argument, or one very like it, and had already decided that the ceremony's legitimacy in the eyes of four hundred watching officers was worth more, this close to the deadline, than Nassiri's professional discomfort with a six-rifle perimeter.
He gave the order himself, because he had learned, across eleven months of this war, that orders delivered secondhand cost him authority he could not currently afford to spend, and he stood on the chapel wing's threshold at dusk and watched six of his most trusted men take up position around a door he would not, for the first time since a blast crew's hole in the ground at Sarakhs had started all of this, be permitted to stand on the other side of himself.
Rostami paused beside him before going in, the covered garment already carried ahead of him by the younger of his two clerics, wrapped now in plain unbleached linen that Nassiri recognized, with a small, unwelcome jolt, as something considerably closer to a burial cloth than a soldier's transport case.
"You could still change your mind," Nassiri said, and heard, saying it, exactly how little conviction the sentence actually carried.
"I could." Rostami looked at him for a long moment, in the flat gold light of a mountain evening neither of them had expected, eleven months ago, to still be standing in together. "I am not going to, Colonel, and I don't believe you actually want me to. You have spent six weeks moving this object through half the smuggling infrastructure in Central Asia specifically so that tomorrow could happen. I am simply the last man standing between you and the version of tomorrow that actually works. Let me do the part of this job only I can do. Go do the part that's still yours — because I promise you, whatever else tonight is, it is not the night either of us can afford to be careless in."
He went in. The door closed, an ordinary wooden door with no reinforcement Nassiri's own construction crews had ever thought worth adding, and Nassiri stood on the wrong side of it in the gathering dark, six rifles between himself and the one thing he had spent six weeks of his life ensuring nothing in this war could take from him, and understood, standing there, that he had just done, willingly, the single most exposed thing he had done since a hole opened in the ground at Sarakhs — and that he had done it not because Rostami had out-argued him, but because some part of him, considerably older than tonight, had already stopped fully trusting his own instincts about what this particular object actually required to stay safe.