In the potter's village: Chapter - 5

As Karim walked hurriedly from the priests' quarters he could feel a sense of urgency in that which he had somehow become a part of. And he knew Rahman was at its very centre. Without a second glance, he sped off to the potter's shop where Rahman spent his nights. It was now late in the night, and such footsteps often attracted unwanted attentions, for it was the hour when clandestine deals were struck and cosummated. He thought of none of this however, and knocked on the potter's door repeatedly, till finally Rahman opened it, weary eyed yet with a smile on his serene face. Karim was quick to narrate to him the details of that evening. Rahman's unchanging expression had an air of having seen it all before, or so Karim felt. Puzzled and concerned, he asked him the reason for that. He replied with, "My father once said: Make your work the goal of your life, and you shall find me in all you see; in me you shall find all from the oceans to the sky and beyond, and in them, me."
Karim was speechless at the level of incomprehensibility, loaded with an equally compelling sense of the mystique that greeted him in those lines. Overcome with that feeling, he picked himself up, muttered a "Rahman, please take care.", and stumbled out of his door. The state of bipolar perceptionary extremes that he had been thrown in from the moment he had met Rahman, was now entering another level.

As he sat in his bed, his wife now increasingly aware of the distance creeping into their relationship, he could think of nothing else but Rahman, and the words he had so effortlessly spoken. At some level he was concerned for his safety, and at another, he felt envious of the kind of conviction with which he lived. He knew only that he had to know more about his origins, and the source of that sense of immovable calm.
Thus he awoke the next morning, and headed off straight to the potter's shop. Unbeknownst to him, the priests had sent a messenger him to the court, who had promptly been redirected to the shop by the concerned wife. The messenger proceeded towards the shop, only to find it closed for the day. He brought word of this to the priests, who were astounded to hear it, for never in the last 3 years had Rahman been unavailable at the shop during the opening hour of business. They knew this was a potentially critical moment, and called on the royal guard which immediately dispatched its spies, who traced Rahman to a small hut located 4 miles outside the village. The priests reached the spot by evening, taking care to approach it by a different path, so as to escape the attentions of Karim, who had been kneeling besides the northward facing wall peeking in through a gap all this while.

As they approached it, they caught sight of a light moving within, and carefully perched themselves along the southern wall, peeking through the aging cracks in the wood. Their eyes widened at the sight that beheld them.