Abidan's house was in the northern quarter, it wasn't on the wealthiest street but it was close enough, solid stone, well maintained, the kind of house of someone who meticulously cared for his surroundings.
A woman answered the door. Perhaps fifty. The specific efficiency of someone who had been managing visitors and keeping the world at bay for years and had developed a system.
"He's not receiving anyone," she said.
"I know," Elham said. "I'll be brief."
She looked at him. At the robe. At Asher. "Everyone says they'll be brief." She started to close the door.
"I'm not here about the city," Elham said.
She stopped. That had landed differently from what she expected. She studied him for a moment. Then: "Five minutes. He tires quickly and I'm not flexible about that."
She led them through a courtyard to a room at the back. Cool and dim, shutters half closed against the afternoon heat. Abidan was in a bed against the far wall, he looked to be in his sixties, thin the way illness made people thin over weeks. He was awake. His eyes moved to Elham when they entered and something in them was still sharp.
He looked at the white robe. At the staff. His expression settled into something that was not hostility but was its close neighbor.
"I've heard abut you in the city," he said. Rougher voice than it probably usually was.
"And I heard you were sick," Elham said. He pulled a stool close and sat down.
Elham studied him. "Please tell me, of everyone who's come here these last three weeks, what have they actually wanted?"
Abidan looked at him. Careful and hesitated before answering. "What does that mean."
"I mean the people who came to this door. What were they actually here for."
A pause. "I don't know why you're asking, but people came to ask me for different things, guidance. Decisions I couldn't make from a bed. Endorsements for things they'd already decided... it could've been anything, why?"
"And before you got sick," Elham said. "Who came then."
Abidan looked at him differently now. "It was usually the same people, for the same reasons," he said.
"So, over twelve years of governing this city and nobody came just to sit with you, and all that's really changed is the visits have gotten shorter, that's unfortunate." A long silence.
"...I suppose that's one way to look at it" Abidan replied.
The woman appeared in the doorway. "Five minutes," she said.
"Give us more time," Elham said. He looked at her. "Please."
She looked at Abidan. Abidan, still looking at the ceiling, gave a small nod. She left.
"This city... I can hear it crying from here on bad days." He said it in sadness.
"I've heard about Han and about how he's been escalating and I know the elders have been paralyzed without someone to chair the sessions." He looked at Elham. "Tell me, what happened this morning?"
"Han was preaching sacrifice theology."
Something moved in Abidan's face. Not surprise. Dread, the specific dread of a thing feared and now confirmed. "I didn't think he'd go that far."
"He went that far because he was cornered. I confronted him publicly and mitigated the damage before it got worse." Elham looked at him. "But I fear he won't stop."
"No," Abidan said. "He won't." He was quiet for a moment.
Elham looked at him. At the thin face and the still-sharp eyes and the man who had been the only imperfect mediation in a city that badly needed one. He had come here because the warmth pointed here.
He needed Abidan to know about Tobiah. He needed Abidan to back Tobiah publicly, from his sickbed if necessary, because a dying man's endorsement would cut through the noise in a way that nothing Elham could engineer would. He needed Abidan's authority and Abidan's illness and Abidan's twelve years of imperfect governance all working together, to put Tobiah in the position the city needed him in.
He had the whole thing mapped before he finished the thought.
"You know, I came here because nobody had come to sit with you," Elham said. "But to be honest with you, I also came because of the carpenter from Benjamin, Tobiah. I need you to please tell me about the dispute," Elham said. "Not the official version. Everything."
Something shifted in Abidan's face. Not a smile exactly. The expression of a man who had been waiting for honesty and had just received it and was deciding what to do with it.
"That's a long conversation."
"I'm not going anywhere."
Abidan settled back against his pillows and started talking. He was a good talker when he had something worth saying, the dispute's real history was older and more complicated than anything Yael had described in the temple, going back thirty years to a water agreement that had been fair at the time and had become unfair incrementally as the northern families' wealth compounded and the southern families' access didn't. He named names. He described the elder council's specific financial entanglements. He talked for forty minutes without stopping and by the end Elham had a clearer picture of Gibeah's wound than he had had from two weeks of watching and listening.
"In case something happens to you, Tobiah, he's the right person to lead this city through what's coming. Both factions trust him. He has no entanglements with either side. He's been right about the petition process for years without anyone listening."
A silence.
"You came here to ask me to endorse him," Abidan said.
"You remind me of myself," he paused. "When I first took this role. I saw the city clearly. I knew what it needed. I spent the first two years engineering outcomes I was sure were correct. Sometimes the outcomes were right. But the engineering always cost something I hadn't accounted for." He looked at Elham. "What will you do differently."
Elham pressed his hand to his chest. The warmth was there. Steady. He had been treating it like a tool and it had kept being steady anyway, patient, waiting for him to remember what it was for. Not a tool. Not a piece of information to file alongside everything else he was building. It was the actual guide God gave him.
"I'm going to stop moving ahead of it," Elham said. He meant the warmth. He didn't explain what he meant. Abidan looked at him for a moment and something in his expression said he understood anyway, the way people who had governed difficult places for twelve years understood things without needing them spelled out.
"The prophet Isaiah came to Hezekiah when he was sick," he said. "Do you know what he said?"
"He told him to put his house in order," Elham said. "Because he was going to die."
"Yes." Abidan looked at him. "That was an honest visit. The prophet came and said the true thing even when the true thing was hard."
"Come back tomorrow," Abidan said. "Not because I'll endorse Tobiah. Come back because you're the first person who came to this room for me rather than for what I can give, and I am very tired of that ceiling."
Elham almost smiled. "Tomorrow," he said.
He walked back through the courtyard. The woman was by the door. She looked at him as he passed and said nothing but something in her face was different from when he had arrived.
Outside, Asher fell into step beside him.
They walked in silence for a while.
"He didn't endorse Tobiah," Asher said.
"No."
"But you're going back tomorrow."
"Yes."
Asher looked at him. "What changed in there."
Elham thought about how to answer that. About the ceiling Abidan was tired of. About the forty minutes of real history that had landed differently from everything he had assembled on his own. About the warmth that had been pointing toward a sick man while he had been pointing himself at a carpenter.
"I've been leaning on my own understanding," he said.
Asher was quiet for a moment. Not surprised. Not saying I told you. Just walking.
"The verse," Asher said. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart."
"And lean not on your own understanding," Elham said.
"I've been leaning too much on my own understanding."