Destroyer

Everyone had to be quiet. Cenedi had said that while their passenger was still unconscious. Particularly the dowager, the heir, and the stray human had to keep quiet, their voices being far too remarkable.

“The drug has taken effect,” Nawari said, “but we should not rely on it. It has its hazard, nandiin-ji.”

There was silence. So on they rolled, with one bound, gagged constable heavily sedated, from that store of small nastinesses the Assassins’ Guild sometimes used. Finesse, Banichi called it.

They maintained particular silence, as the truck rolled slowly over smooth, and therefore well-maintained, road, which indicated a populated, frequently-traveled region. It was probably a picturesque village they had come to. They were probably not in Desigien, but at Adaran, at the railhead, and the Desigien truck sitting still and waiting for the train was probably not that unlikely an evening event.

Banichi got out of the truck, and asked, near the side: “How are things?”

“Our guest is sedated,” Cenedi said. “We shall renew the dose every half hour. We are monitoring him carefully.”

“We are at the station, parked at the appropriate place. There is no shade, one regrets to say. How is the dowager?”

“Hot and cross, nadi,” Ilisidi snapped. “But it seems we all are hot and cross, and will freeze tonight. Cease talking. Take no chances.”

“Yes,” Banichi said simply, and got back into the truck cab, for a long, long wait.

It was a very long, uncomfortable silence, in the stifling, oil-smelling heat of the sun on the canvas above their heads. Once and twice again someone administered another dose of sedative, and reported they still had a steady pulse.

Someone approached the truck, a slow scuff of gravel. That someone, a female person, went as far as the door of the truck and spoke quietly and respectfully to Banichi and Jago. She said something about having walked here, and being the driver, and taking the truck back.

“When the train leaves,” Banichi answered that person. “Come back then. Do not associate yourself with us, for your own safety.”

“What of the fish?” Jago asked.

“We have everything on yesterday’s ice, nadi,” the female person said. “Some days the truck breaks down. We will bring the catch in tomorrow night. We shall make up for it. Thank you for asking.”

“We have an unexpected problem,” Banichi said. “The constable met us on the road and questioned us. He is sedated. Back there. Would you know who would properly be on the road above Cobo village, asking us questions?”

“I by no means know, nadi,” was the answer. “But the Cobo constable would not be wandering around up on the ridge.”

Banichi said, “Come have a look at him.”

The truck rocked. Steps moved around to the tailgate, and Banichi lifted the tarp. Sunlight came in, and a young girl stood with Banichi and Jago, a pretty young girl with astonished eyes.

“Aiji-ma?” she said reverently.

“Nandiin,” Banichi said, “this is Ruso, our associate’s daughter. And the driver. We would not let her drive it here.”

“We are grateful,” Ilisidi said, from the deep recesses, where the angled light glimmered off atevi eyes. “We regret the inconvenience. Show her this man.”

Nawari, a shadow against the light, turned their unconscious prisoner’s face.

“Dataini,” was the immediate, frightened-sounding answer. “Dataini. His wife is Tasigin. He is the new constable.”

“The new constable?” Banichi asked.

“Here in Adaran. Since—” Ruso’s eyes moved uneasily toward the dowager and back. “Since the new authority, in Shejidan.”

“And where is the old Adaran constable, Ruso-nadi?” Ilisidi asked.

“Gone back to fishing, aiji-ma, since they took his authority away.”

“We give it back. Do you suppose, if you found him this evening, he might deal with this man?”

Ruso’s eyes were very large. “I think he would run that risk, if it was your order, aiji-ma. But the wife has relatives.”

“See to it,” Ilisidi said with a wave of her hand, and Banichi lowered the tarp, taking the light away. A low-pitched discussion followed, outside, how they would leave this Dataini in the truck, well-secured, and how Ruso must go to the former constable in this town, and take measures to take Dataini’s wife into custody too, before she could realize her husband was missing and make a phone call to whatever regional authority was overseeing this remote fishing district.

The counterrevolution had started. And the young driver, Ruso, had volunteered in harm’s way, with time and force of the essence. It was not the move Banichi would have advocated if they were going to take months dealing with this.

God, Bren thought, we may have to deal with Kadigidi appointees in districts where we’re going, not to mention the cities. It was an unfortunate possibility that these new authorities were still compiling their own list of everyone within the man’chi of Tabini’s household and Geigi’s, Geigi being aiji up on the station, and in an otherwise unassailable position… threaten those under his protection, since they could not reach Geigi.

This could be a problem, Bren said to himself. This could be a real problem.

“Is there water, mani-ma?” Cajeiri asked. “Might we just leave the corner of the tarp up a little?”

“Hush,” Ilisidi said sharply, and there was renewed quiet, in which they could still hear the discussion with Ruso, a discussion in which it seemed there was some sort of written instruction, some commitment to paper that they had found in the dash panel of the truck, and a pricked finger—blood could work, where wax was lacking, however imperfectly, impressing a mark from Banichi’s Guild ring. It was an Assassin’s signature they were producing for the girl, a request with legal force, when Banichi was acting in his protective capacity. His own authority at least matched any village constable’s.

“There,” he heard Banichi say. “Let the Adaran constable carry that for a warrant, and gather deputies, as many as he can.”

They moved away, then, and by the give of springs, sat on the front bumper, Banichi, Jago, and the girl from Desigien together, as it seemed, looking, as they would, like country folk holding a bored conversation. Things grew quiet for while.

“There was almost certainly a phone call that put that man out on the road,” Cenedi said. “Someone, at sea or on land, saw nand’ Toby’s boat. When the constable does not phone back with a report, there may be an inquiry sent on more than a local level.”

“Good we are not staying the night,” Ilisidi said.

Other footsteps approached the truck. Whoever was sitting on the bumper did not get up, but Ruso, clever girl, told whoever had come up that these were her cousins from down the coast, that they had sailed up to beg the loan of a net, their own village having suffered extremely in a recent storm. Converse went on and on, mostly Ruso speaking in that local lilt, and the conversation up there settled to the usual grumbling about the weather, the fish, daringly, to the market since the trouble. Others gathered, and for a time the truck rocked to bodies leaning against it, all complaining bitterly about market prices and the attitude of the owners of the ice plant, who thought their profits should stay the same, no matter what the depressed market did to the villages.

The talk dwindled, then, some conversants going off to a local watering hole, inviting Ruso and her supposed cousins to join them, but Ruso said she would stay with the truck.

“Now who would steal it, nadi,” one laughed, “or filch one of your fish?”

“The new constable, for all I know,” she said, a bit of boldness that made Bren’s heart skip a beat.

“You have a point, Ruso-ji,” the speaker said, and voices and presence retreated.

There was a collective sigh of relief, audible in the dark. Their prisoner stirred, and went out again, to everyone’s relief.

Bren pillowed his head on his arms and tried to catch a nap beside Tano and Algini. He shut his eyes, tried to ignore the heat, hoped that Toby had gotten well away from the coast by now.

Hoped that the constable’s wife expected him to be out at all hours.

He did sleep a little. He came to in utter dark and much cooler air, no light even from the edges of the tarp, with the noise of a train in the distance. Everybody was stirring about, and he sat up, sore in every joint from resting on bare boards—he could only imagine how Ilisidi fared.

“We are ready, nandi,” Tano said, close beside him.

The train chugged to a stop, passed them, so that they must be alongside the cars. There was a good deal of hallooing and fuss up and down, and Ruso—Bren had gotten to recognize her voice—talked to someone, some talk of ice, a bill, and papers, and then she came back again, saying her cousins would help her load, there was no need of any other. There was a great deal of rattling about, rolling of large doors, cursing and thumps, as something loaded on noisily in their vicinity. It sounded like steel drums.

This diminished, finally, and whoever it was trundled off with the rattle of an empty pull-truck. There followed a period of silence, in which the unconscious constable stirred, and went out yet again, this time gagged and tied to an upright of the truck slats.

“When?” Cajeiri whispered miserably, teeth chattering. “When shall we move, mani-ma? What if we miss the train?”

“Hush,” Ilisidi hissed.

Abruptly someone pulled loose the ropes and freed the back of the tarp. Jago was there, in the dark, outlined in the light of a lantern somewhere distant, to the side.

“Quickly, aiji-ma.” Jago held up the edge of the tarp as two of Cenedi’s men rolled out to assist the dowager. Bren snagged his computer and Tano and Algini worked past him to get at the baggage. Cenedi and Nawari and Cajeiri himself helped Ilisidi to the end of the truck bed, simply sliding her inventively if unceremoniously toward the rear on a piece of baggage. Cenedi then jumped out and lifted her down in his arms, ever so carefully, himself no youngster, but he accepted no help doing it.

“I do not believe I shall walk,” Ilisidi said.

“This way,” Banichi said, and marked a destination with his flashlight, shining the beam along the waiting row of cars, onto the one fairly near their truck, with its door open.

Nawari clambered into the dark boxcar and knelt on the edge. Cenedi handed Ilisidi up to him, and Tano flung baggage in and jumped aboard to the side, pulling Cajeiri up after him. Bren slid off the end of the truck and tried to help Algini with the baggage, but Jago took over that job. “Get aboard, Bren-ji, quickly.”

He was the most conspicuous item in their company. He’d just spent two years where he was ordinary, and he found his protective instincts were dulled, rusted, right along with his wits. He moved quickly, made a try at getting up onto the waist-high deck of the car, computer and all. He couldn’t make it, and tried again. Tano hauled him aboard by the back of his coat.

Scrambling out of the way on the wooden deck, leaning his back against the boxcar’s wall, he checked his pocket. He had not lost his gun. His eyes, accustomed to the dark, made out the surrounds, the source of a pervading chill. It was what they had expected, a wooden refrigerator car, stacked high with dim blocks of ice, with crates of, yes, another village’s fish, already loaded, on their way to morning market somewhere along the rail line.

Banichi was last in, and slid the door to after him. Ruso helped shove it, brave girl.

“Good luck, aijiin-ma,” she said fervently, and the door shut with a thump.

Dark came with it, and persisted, until Cenedi produced a penlight and helped arrange seating for the dowager against the wall, on a pile of baggage.

“It smells like fish in here,” Cajeiri complained.

“They are fish,” Ilisidi said. “Hush.”

“Mani-ma.” A pained whisper, next, which no one could fail to hear. “I have need of the convenience.”

“That can be attended, young sir,” Cenedi said, and took the young lad toward a dark, opposite corner of the car, which, fortunately, had plenty of gaps between the boards.

There was mortified silence after Cajeiri returned, silence except for a trembling sigh, as the youngster collapsed onto the wet and mildly fishy floor to sit against the wall, elbows on knees, hands wrapped about his head, a thoroughly miserable picture.

Bren paid his own visit to that small corner. So did others. Life seemed a great deal more bearable, afterward.

The train fired up and slowly, slowly, without the blast of a whistle to disturb the village in the dead of night, got itself into motion, gathering speed with a regular thump of wheels along the rails.

“Ruso says the train will stop briefly for mail at Sidonin,” Banichi said, settling down with a sigh, “which should be just before dawn.”

Sidonin. Next to the Ragi estate of Taiben. It wouldn’t have been a preferred strategy, in Bren’s reckoning of things, to go straight to the heart of the trouble.

But staying aboard into full daylight, when the train reached some town market center, didn’t seem a good idea.

There was a sort of breakfast by flashlight, if one counted Toby’s food bars, slightly crushed by sitting on them—they were glad to have them, even so, and washed them down with melted mouthfuls of fishy ice, to conserve the little left in their water-flasks. The train sounded like one of the old-fashioned sort, a steam-powered relic, which rocked along at a fairly sedate clip, whistling eerily at lonely points of hazard.

The chill of the ice had come welcome after the truckbed, at first, but Bren found the chill seeping into his bones after an hour. He sat in near complete dark, now that necessary moving about was done. His hands and feet and backside grew increasingly numb, the faint taste of fish persisted in his mouth, and he was increasingly convinced those cereal bars would remind him of that fishy taste as long as he lived.

Distaste wouldn’t survive the next pangs of hunger, he said to himself. An upset stomach was the least of his worries. A meal at all was better than none. And he had actually gotten a little sleep in the truck, and caught a little more, in the surreal spaces between blasts of the whistle. He found a way to pillow his head on his computer case, and hoped the fishy smell would not embed itself in his clothes.

Eventually, at one waking, there seemed a ghostly gray light coming in the seam of the door, and they were still thumping along. Banichi and Jago had gotten back into uniform. Ilisidi had bestirred herself, and gotten up onto her feet in the brisk cold. She walked about, relying on her stick for balance, waving off Cajeiri’s well-meaning assistance and Cenedi’s offered arm. Cenedi had arranged a sort of a chair for her, consisting of their waterproof luggage atop blocks of ice of suitable height, and she had rested in the best arrangement of all of them. He was heartened to see her up and moving steadily, if slowly. What it cost the dowager in pain he had no idea, but she was on her feet, and refusing to give up. And if she could, no one else could complain. He began to rub life back into knees and ribs and elbows, and thought about hot tea, which was as remote as the space station.

Squeal of iron wheels. The train began to slow gradually, braking, with attendant squeak and thump and rattle. Cenedi leapt up immediately to steady the dowager, who allowed him to see her to her seat.

“Are we supposed to stop, nadiin?” Cajeiri asked worriedly.

“Likely,” Nawari said, extremely curt, and shushed the question.

The dowager had settled and perched braced with her cane as the train slowed to a stop.

Sidonin, one hoped, the mail stop, edge of the Central Association.

In Sidonin, there was more than a chance of a hostile constable. In the territory of the Central Association, an hour or so by rail from Kadigidi territory, their opposition would have set up shop in far more elaborate fashion than in Adaran, on the coast. Not only a constable, but likely the town authorities as well.

Banichi and Tano heaved the door back while the train was still slowing to a stop. It was the faintest of dawn light, and a lantern showed, when Bren took a quick look outside.

No chance that they could jump out before the train reached the station and avoid the possibility of being spotted. It was a long way down, next to the hazard of the track. Ilisidi couldn’t do it. Cajeiri couldn’t. He didn’t know if he could. For the dowager’s sake—at least for hers, they had to wait for a full stop and get down in better order.

Guns were a real likelihood, in that case. Bren patted his pocket and drew a deep breath. Slower. Slower. Slower. Thump-thump-thump.

Wheeze and stop. Banichi and Jago jumped down onto the graveled slant. Nawari and his mate followed.

And any employees of the rail line who saw Assassins’ Guild black suddenly in evidence beside their train at this hour of the morning were likely to be looking for cover, fast. Bystanders were safe during a Guild operation—if they ducked fast and avoided involvement. Things had to be finessed, Banichi’s favorite word, and that meant delicacy, and avoiding the simply feckless and unfortunate.

Two more of Ilisidi’s men heaved baggage down. Bren passed his computer down to Jago, who shouldered it and held up her arms to steady him as he jumped.

He landed hard. Needles lanced pain through every bone in his cold feet, and he collided with her. He bit his lip, apologized, trying not to fold in pain, and to walk on the edges of his feet, simultaneously looking around and orienting himself on the railroad siding, a steep, gravelly bank, a cluster of small buildings with a faint electric light on the porch. People moved in that light, people they didn’t want to notice them.

They lifted the dowager down gently, silently. Cajeiri simply scrambled over the threshold of the doorway and lit on the gravel on young, strong feet.

The people down there didn’t look to have seen them. Better still, off to the rear of that building there was a small bus parked, one of the sort that served train passengers, to reach town center and other means of transport.

Tano signed in that direction, and Banichi waved them on. Tano and Algini sprinted silently across that dirt yard, and had the door of the bus open in a few seconds, whether or not it had been locked. Before the rest of them could cross the intervening distance, Nawari carrying the dowager at a near run, Algini had gotten under the hood and had the bus started, a startlingly loud noise.

Cenedi helped them get Ilisidi aboard, shoved Cajeiri after, and then shoved Bren up the steps, following after. Nawari heaved baggage into the back door. Two of Cenedi’s men got up onto the roof rack, a great deal of bumping and thumping—carrying rifles, Bren suspected, settling into a bench seat, watching for his own team to come aboard before someone down at the station came to investigate. Or opened fire.

Jago got in. Banichi followed, Tano and Algini followed, Tano closed the door and Algini slid behind the wheel. Jago remained standing, hanging with her elbow about the protective rail next to Algini, who floored it and turned the wheel vigorously. Banichi braced himself with a wide stance in mid-aisle, watching the rear view.

Bren, clinging to the seat in front of him, behind Cajeiri and the dowager, looked back and saw lights bouncing in the rear window, people running, shadows in the night. Red and blue lights flashed, emergency vehicles.

Algini swerved onto a gravel road that paralleled the tracks, throwing Bren hard against the window-side. Swerved again, up and over the rails behind the rear of the train, then dived down the other side of the tracks, skidded onto a service road in a spatter of gravel—whatever track they followed would follow the railroad, no likelier than roads along the coast to persist for very far, but it got them out of there, and kept them going, and a second look back showed dark behind them, no sign of red lights, just a light at the rear of the train.

The bus ran flat out on the rutted road, bouncing over potholes and sending gravel flying where it took a turn—the men up on the roof must be clinging for their lives.

Somebody back there at the station had to have made a phone call to higher authority, getting instructions, calling for reinforcements, maybe light aircraft.

Jago had a map. That was the paper. She held on with an elbow, tilted the paper to the dim light from the instrument panel, gave instructions, and Algini took a turn to the right, onto a track rougher than the last.

Right. Where did a right turn lead them? He’d remembered where Sidonin was, near the edge of its association, and the rail here served several provinces, skimming along the hazy join that was the atevi concept of a border. They were maybe within forty k of that area of hazy authority, within fifty or sixty, possibly, of Taiben district, which ought to offer safety, maybe a hope of finding Tabini—or run them right into an occupying presence, Taiben being the heart of Ragi territory, and the Ragi Association being the very center of Tabini’s power…

Logically the Kadigidi might have posted observers and controls and guards along this very road, which began to have all the look of a farm-to-market route, maybe one that got Taiben goods to Sidonin’s rail station, and vice versa—he didn’t know. When they’d come to the lodge, they’d come in from the south and east, never the west.

Daylight had begun to fill in some details in the landscape. He saw tall grass, scrub, occasional deciduous growth. Taiben was forest intermittent with sweeping grassland. Hunting territory, with the aiji’s own hunting lodge deep in its territory, a rustic former hall sometimes converted for tourists and ordinary hunters, what time the aiji was not in residence. The place was a warren of hunting trails, abundant in game, with rugged hills, areas where no one lived, rugged terrain and rolling meadow where no one was allowed to hunt or to enter at all, no one but Taiben rangers, overseeing the heart and core of the district, or Tabini-aiji himself, who never fired a gun there.

Good memories, good memories thrown into jeopardy on this rough and half-lit road. A fool had to know where they’d gone. And the Kadigidi had to have watchers out… whether or not they’d be strong enough to interfere with a Taiben move or one from the railway at Sidonin, they’d know, they’d be set up with guns…

As long as no one got aircraft up looking for them… as long as nobody started dropping grenades. They made a very conspicuous target; and if there was an ounce of speed to be gotten out of the bus, Algini was looking for it.

He clung to the seat as they swerved, saw Cajeiri actually trying to sleep in the seat ahead, head against the window, and bouncing from time to time as they hit a particularly deep pothole, but wedging in the tighter the harder the bumps. The dowager, beside him, had Banichi in the aisle, quietly bracing her in the worst stretches. But the boy beside her fell asleep, mouth open—Cajeiri was that tired, and the motion of the bus finally did it, maybe the illusion of having gotten away, when nothing else had lulled him.

Bren gazed at him, the momentary focus of very worried thoughts. Felt sorry for him.

Hell of a birthday, kid. Hell of a few days.

And what the boy didn’t know about their present situation had the paidhi’s stomach in an upheaval. Speed over stealth. Speed, over the chance of bogging down in a sniper war while their opposition called for air support, and them with the dowager, afoot in rough terrain… he had enough of an idea of the reasoning in their security’s choices to keep his stomach in a knot, and his eyes sweeping what he could see of the road past Banichi, dreading the sight of a roadblock, the moment at which their two on the roof might open fire.

Fifty k to a dubious safety in which they couldn’t even guarantee the heart of Taiben was still in allied hands. This whole desperate venture could come to grief in the next five minutes.

The road passed trees, passed trees on either hand, and by now the dawn showed more than one tree or two deep, a thicket, a forest. Their road bounced, rolled, pitched, and swerved left and right. Branches raked the overhead, hazarding their pair on the roof.

And with a soft gasp of brakes, Algini slowed the bus, and stopped.

The men on the roof got down. Tano opened the door, Banichi got off the bus and did not get back aboard, conferring out in the dim dawn with the two from the roof.

Then those two boarded and Banichi did not. Banichi wasn’t there. Bren looked left and right out the windows.

Where has he gone? Bren wondered. But maybe it was as simple as a call of nature.

In front of him, Cajeiri moaned and turned sideways in the seat, seeking more room for his limbs. The dowager sat still, waiting.

Then the bus started to move again, and Banichi was not aboard. Nawari had gotten up and move into position to brace the dowager.

It was too much. Bren stood up, using the seat safety grips as he edged past Nawari to one he could ask, to Jago, who was still hanging with her map, at Algini’s side.

“Are we onto Taiben’s lands, Jago-ji?” he asked.

“Well onto them,” Jago said. “Unfortunately… the tank is nearing bottom. It was only half full when we left.”

“At least they’re not on top of us,” he said, just glad to be alive and in something like daylight. “Where did Banichi go?”

Jago stooped and gave a look out the windshield. “A short hike, to a message drop. We shall pick him up when the trail winds back across the hill.”

“A message drop?” How in reason had they arranged that? And with whom?

“We have no great reason to hope it is active, nandi,” Jago said, “but if anyone has escaped into the woods, there are such places. There always have been. We were in the aiji’s service, before we came to yours.”

In Tabini’s personal service, and likely in and out of Taiben and perhaps privy to its defensive secrets… neither of them had ever alluded to that knowledge, not even in crisis.

Which meant Banichi took the lead here. Cenedi was, like Ilisidi, from the east, from across the continental divide… and might know many things… but maybe not Taiben.

“You are not supposed to know where these places are, Bren-ji. Not even all the Taiben folk do, but the lodge director, his assistant, the aiji’s personal guard. As we were, previously, of course, in that number. If the lodge staff has escaped, and gotten to the drops, they will leave word, and break into cells, and use the drops to communicate between cells, avoiding any transmissions that might be traced. We shall see if the system is active.”

The road turned, the bus exiting the woods and running along the grassy side of the hill. Forest fire had denuded the farther slopes. But that was old damage. Young trees were coming back, a thick bluegreen growth half a man’s height.

Brush scraped the fenders, and grass brushed the undercarriage. Their road might lead to one of the villages, but it had not been much used this season.

A figure popped out of the brush at the next turn, and Bren’s heart thumped. But it was Banichi, waiting for them, and the bus slowed.

Banichi waved at them, signed for them to turn, and there was no place to turn, but in among the trees, deep into brush.

Algini did it, and Bren steadied himself by a grip on Jago’s rail. Brush scraped the windows. Algini drove it in solidly, plowing down undergrowth, breaking his way through until the bus was enmeshed in brush. Algini reached and opened the door, which Banichi had to pry open, breaking a branch.

Another man appeared in the woods, at Banichi’s back. “Look out!” Bren called out, heart in his mouth, and then felt foolish, because there were two more, and then a fourth, and Banichi seemed quite easy in their presence.

“Allies, Bren-ji,” Jago said, patting his arm, folded her map in a few practiced moves, and climbed down. Cenedi was ready to follow.

Bren negotiated the steps after Cenedi, having to cling to the rail, on tall, tall steps, to be sure his weary legs stayed under him. The ground seemed to be pitching and rolling, and he was hungry, and dizzy, thirsty, and absolutely exhausted from sheer worry.

“Keimi-nadi,” Banichi said, “I present Cenedi, chief of security to the aiji-dowager.”

“Nadi.” Keimi was an older man, in country clothes, with scratches on his face and graying hair straying from its queue. But there was no country accent. “Welcome. Welcome to the aiji-dowager, and to the paidhi.”

“Nadi.” Bren gave a nod of his head. More watchers had appeared, women and men, even a couple of children. The woods was populated.

“Along with ourselves,” Cenedi said, “we have brought trouble. This bus, for which our opposition will be searching by every possible means.”

“We should get away from this area,” Keimi said. “And will. Is the dowager able to ride?”

“Able to ride?” That small stir in the aisle of the bus at their backs was not another of their security, it was Ilisidi herself who forged her way to the door, above the steps, with every intent of descending. “Able to ride?” Ilisidi said indignantly. “Bury me, the day I am unable to ride. Have you mechieti?”

“We have sixteen, aiji-ma, scattered about for safety. Sixteen, and their gear, and can get others.”

“Excellent.” Ilisidi wanted to descend, and lowered her cane to the steps. Cenedi reached to assist her, and when he had her in reach, lifted her by the waist and set her on the ground, where she planted her cane and, leaning on it, surveyed the gathering that had materialized out of the dawn woods.

“Nadiin-ji, where is my grandson?”

People looked at one another in dismay, and Keimi bit his lip.

“Say it,” Ilisidi snapped with a thump of that cane. “Is he dead, or is he alive?”

“We by no means know, nand’ dowager. The aiji was here when the trouble began at Shejidan, and there was some talk of going back to the capital, but he sent the paidhi—Mercheson-paidhi—to Mogari-nai, and then followed, and came back. But he left.”

“He came back from Mogari-nai,” Ilisidi said. Bren’s heart lifted. There was news. “And where did he go?”

“He refused to say, nand’ dowager. His guard said it was for safety.”

“He had his guard with him.”

“He had Deisi and Majidi, nand’ dowager. He did not have the other two. One fears—”

“And my mother?” Cajeiri asked, pressing forward. “Was my mother with him?”

“Cajeiri-nandi?” Keimi asked. The boy had been four when Taiben last saw him. “Nandi, Damiri-daja was with the aiji, in good health. And we do know they left eastward, with Deisi and Majidi.”

“Alone?” the dowager interrupted sharply.

“We wished to send a larger guard, aiji-ma. We all would have gone. We could not persuade the aiji your grandson. He said he would move more quietly.”

“Toward the east,” Ilisidi mused, and Bren drew a deep breath, thinking: either into Damiri’s home territory, Atageini land, relying her great-uncle Tatiseigi’s having stayed on Tabini’s side in this mess—or past the Atageini and past Kadigidi territory, into deeper wilderness.

Or straight at Kadigidi borders, to strike at the heart of the enemy, Bren thought with a chill. On one level it would be like Tabini, not to depart without retaliation—but, God, against tremendous odds, and refusing Taiben’s offer, and with Damiri.

Instinct said no, that wasn’t what he had done, not with Damiri on his hands, not with the ship due to show up with answers, with the dowager, with his heir. He’d want to minimize damage, want to keep his losses low, his strength intact, and organize.

“Then we shall assume he is waiting for us,” Ilisidi said, echoing his own estimation. “We have committed the coastal association at Desigien. Now we have contacted you. Attack will surely follow in both instances, if the scoundrels setting up in Shejidan have begun to track us. We were approached by one of their people in Desigien territory, and we assume there are others of his ilk in other villages. We have brought you this ungainly bus, laying tracks all the way, which we had rather not have done, but we had little choice—we have come in from the rail station, with an unfortunate lot of racket, and we fear they will follow.”

“It will not find us, dowager-ji. We are never where it comes. And those they send here do not come back.”

Historic guerilla war, the way atevi had fought from the dawn of time, before the Assassins’ Guild had risen up to make it a conflict of professionals. These were not of that guild. They were foresters. They were there, they were not, they scattered and they reconverged on a timetable that had nothing to do with clocks. Bren had no idea what their capabilities were, and he would put his money on the Assassins, in a contest, but tracking them—the edge was with the Taiben folk.

“Come, nandiin,” Keimi said, and moved a branch aside. Others held the brush back, making a hazy path through the thicket, one that the dowager followed, with Cenedi, with Cajeiri, and all of them followed, baggage hauled out of the bus, ported along. Bren carried his computer, and Jago carried her duffle and his just behind him, the men taking two bags apiece, their bulk a hard load in the thicket, and the rangers helped, holding branches aside, making a corridor for them, leading them by ways that became, imperceptibly, a trail, broad, free of branches.

Brush ahead of them cracked, however, with a noise that left no doubt of a presence in the woods, and at a distance, a mechieti made that soft, disgusted sound that, once heard, one never forgot.

Mechieti. Four-footed transport that left far less trace in Taiben’s wide lands than a stolen bus. In a moment more, around a bend of the trail, a rider sat waiting with a number of saddled mechieti, tall, rough-looking beasts, golden brown to sable, and possessed of two hand-span long tusks that ordinarily were capped, in domestic mechieti, for safety of bystanders.

These were not. The tusks were bare, and dangerous, and all the herd went under saddle, reins simply lapped about saddle rings, but they were not led—and would not stray off, not even if shots were flying. It was all follow-the-leader in a crisis, the impulse that made a charge of these beasts so formidable.

The sole rider slid down off that leader, a scarred, ear-bitten creature, and, maintaining a careful hold on the halter, he bowed to Ilisidi and offered her the rein.

She can’t, Bren thought in dread. She hasn’t the strength, and, dammit, she won’t admit it.

“Sidi-ji,” Cenedi said, offering his hand.

Ilisidi ignored him, took the rein and the quirt, administered a whack to the impervious red-brown shoulder, a second whack, and a tug at the rein. The mechieti swung its tusked head around, snorted, stopped short by the handler while it inhaled the scent of someone strange, a diminutive someone who tapped its foreleg, now that she had its attention, tapped it hard behind, and took no nonsense.

Second snort. It had the scent, it had the signal, and that foreleg obediently shot out, the shoulder dipped, and, with Cenedi’s slight boost, Ilisidi grasped the saddle ring with the quirt-hand, got her foot squarely in the mounting-stirrup, and used the momentum of the mechieti’s sudden rise to land astride, not to pitch over the other shoulder—thank God, not to pitch off, as the paidhi had so notoriously done on one occasion. Ilisidi was up, she had the rein in one hand, the quirt in the other, and she was secure. More, she no longer struggled to walk: she had four fast legs under her. The mechieti in question gave an explosive sigh, acknowledging an expert hand in charge, no showy moves, just little taps of the quirt at the right time and an unfamiliar mechieti circled out of the way under complete control.

It was a knack the paidhi oh, so wished he had—because the next matter at hand was for him to get up on one of these beasts, and not to be ripped up by those tusks or pitched onto his head.

“Nand’ paidhi?” Keimi had loosed the rein on a smallish mechieti, pulled the requisite quirt from its secure place, and offered him transport.

He took the offered rein and the quirt in hand, and had no shame at all in using Banichi’s help to get up, no need for the beast to make violent moves or even to kneel: Banichi threw him upward, he landed astride, did not pitch over the other way, and settled. He had the rein, and the creature turned its head on its snaky neck, one limpid, treacherous eye measuring its likely chances of unseating him. The ivory tusks gleamed in the forest shadow.

Timidity with these beasts was lethal. He resolutely tapped its shoulder, took his chance and tapped the hindquarters, to make it swing back out of the way. It answered his signal, wonderful beast, and even stood still while Jago passed his computer up to him.

That was as far as he had to manage. The beast need not move until the leader moved, would not stray, and he settled the strap over his head, as secure as he could be. His personal duffle he saw loaded onto another mechieti, baggage lashed to the saddles of three additional mechieti, before all was done. When their company was all settled aboard, there were still left five mechieti for the oldest and the youngest of Keimi’s party—and those five mounts turned out to accommodate seven, since children doubled up. Adults clearly meant to walk—wherever they were going.

Keimi led off at a brisk walk on the broad trail, branched off to the right when there was a choice and kept them moving, downhill and up again.

No one said, even yet, where they were going, and it was too difficult to ask, strung out as they were, the mechieti assuming their habitual order in the herd. They were heading to another of the drop points, Bren was fairly sure. On his legs’ account he hoped for a short ride: none of them had ridden in years, and even Cajeiri’s young body was going to feel it in an hour, let alone the dowager’s and Cenedi’s. But for their safety’s sake, he hoped it was a long way from the bus, which sat like a signpost in the brush. Getting the dowager clear away from it was a priority that needed no questions.

The Taiben rangers were no fools, and as they moved out, one could suspect other, well-armed parties might well move in to watch that bus and wait for someone from the opposition to come investigating… and if the Sidonin authorities were no fools, they might hesitate to take the chance themselves. If the Kadigidi tried it, they could be sure their quarry was not likely to be sitting there waiting to be caught. In the upshot of the whole affair, very likely local authorities in Sidonin would, after a little show of anger for Murini-aiji’s consumption, send someone to the Taibeni under truce and negotiate to get their bus back, oh, in a few days, when the dust had settled.

By then—by then, their party might be a long way gone from the area. Maybe by then they would have gained news of Tabini. Maybe they would be rallying supporters for a return to power and the chain of dominoes they had started in Adaran might fall here, too.

That thought lent a giddy feeling of freedom, with the willing strength of the animal under him, with the rhythm of movement and the creak of leather, the home sun’s light sifting through bluegreen leaves above and about them.

This was Taiben. This was where he and Tabini had started all those years ago, a simple hunting trip, the gift of a forbidden firearm. Thoughts started picking up details, old memories, people, places, connections remade. Resources. Possibilities.

Chapter 8

Whistles began to sound through the woods, faintly carrying beyond hills and thickets—the source might have been at the next turn of the trail, or far, far off. Cajeiri looked over his shoulder, startled, when first they heard them, and then as Keimi answered with a similar whistle, Cajeiri settled in again, perhaps some deep memory of having heard those whistles before, in the earliest years of his young life.

They were watched, but the watchers were their own, protective. Keimi’s easy attitude said he believed they were safe, and Banichi’s said he believed Keimi, so Bren felt reassured enough.

The mechieti hit their best traveling stride on trails well-used and clear of overhead entanglement—not forest creatures, but perfectly capable in that environment. Their party took only small breaks for rest, and at last let the mechieti water at a small forest stream, where they themselves drank as much as they wanted, water that tasted not of immaculate filters, but of the woods where it flowed. Clear and cold, it held the slight mineral tang of stone and the slight flavor of good clean moss. Bren washed his face with it, taking in the chill and the smell of the deep springs that fed it—shivered, happy in the sensations.

Cajeiri spat out his first mouthful in sheer surprise, but he looked around him, saw everyone else drinking, and then drank without complaint, wise lad. He, too, washed, and wiped his hair back—a long strand had escaped its queue, and, dampened, made a trailing streamer beside his face. He stuck it behind his ear and hugged his arms about him, sitting like a lump on the mossy bank, a very weary boy, not so full of questions now, not in the last two hours.

But two teenaged Taibeni drank near him, turning shy looks in his direction, and then offered him a bit to eat, one of those little nut and fruit bars Bren would have been glad to have, remembering his own time in Taiben. Cajeiri clearly had his doubts of the irregular, much-handled roll, and Bren watched, wondering if he should say something, as, indeed, their difficult Cajeiri, whose delicate palate had balked at unprocessed water, hesitated between courtesy and suspicion. The boy of the pair held it out nonetheless, insisting with a motion of his hand and an earnest look. Cajeiri hesitantly took it, took a bite, and a bigger bite, then ate the whole sweet, and washed it down with a double handful of the despised spring water.

“Thank you, nadiin,” Cajeiri said, and two heads bobbed in respect, the three of them crouching there, three youngsters on the mossy edge. Good, Bren thought, seeing Cajeiri relax and trust those who ought to be trusted.

And when they were underway again, the two Taibeni, who had been walking to the rear of their column, now walked alongside Cajeiri’s mechieti, keeping the pace with strong, determined strides, looking up with just now and again a little youthful chatter, a protective attitude—they were older—and occasionally the necessity to dodge a stray sapling. Cajeiri began to ask questions: where do you live, how long have you been here, how did you find us? In Cajeiri, this flow of questions was a heartening sign.

Considering how the saddle hurt now, it was remarkably good spirits. Bren bore his own discomfort, looking at the dowager, wondered how she was bearing up, and whether she was going to manage another long stretch of this traveling.

He was very much wondering that, several hours on, in late afternoon, when another few whistles came from somewhere ahead. Keimi answered that whistle, and before long, in a little cleft in the wooded hill, they met other rangers camped. There was a herd of mechieti, all under saddle, a greater number than the five rangers who waited there… for them, it seemed.

Now they had mechieti enough for all of them to ride.

“How did they know to meet us?” Cajeiri asked his young guides, and there were answers, a conversation that strayed into the trail system—interesting to know, but by now Bren was thinking obsessively only of his backside, and wondering if it was going to be less painful just to keep going at greater speed, wherever they were going, all of them on mechieti, or whether they might, please God, stop now, spend the night, and stop moving, never mind the hour of mortal pain when they got into the saddle tomorrow morning. He had reached the limit, legs two years unaccustomed even to long walks, let alone this abuse, and the conference of rangers afoot and mounted passed in a haze of absolute misery.

No one had yet uttered a word about their destination, which might be here, or days off, but likely all this hurry was to meant put distance between them and the bus, and any likelihood of the opposition tracking Ilisidi and the boy. They might have been riding in circles for all appearances—at least it had been uphill and downhill and around bends and through low spots, getting only to more forest, which, in Taiben, covered half the province.

Cajeiri, however, asked, “Are we staying, nadiin? Are we getting down now?”

Try, “Where are we? What are we doing here?” Bren thought, but he wanted detail that wouldn’t bear shouting up and down a moving column. He thought his staff might have an idea. He hoped they did. It was beyond the paidhi’s need to know.

They stayed stopped for a long conversation, out of earshot. Then Cenedi got off, and began to help the dowager to dismount.

So they were getting down, for a while, at least. With a profound sigh and a hope of at least an hour to sit on unmoving ground, Bren expertly secured the rein, slipped his quirt into its loop, slipped his leg over and slid down the mechieti’s side.

Mistake. Bad mistake. His legs buckled, his ankle gave on soft ground, and for a precarious moment he was in that worst of positions with mechieti, flat on his back on the ground, dazedly looking up at his mechieti’s underside. Banichi and Jago appeared out of nowhere, Banichi to seize the mechieti’s halter, Jago to haul him to his feet and brush off his clothes.

“The paidhi is exhausted,” Ilisidi said from a distance, having witnessed his tumble, and perhaps finding in his mishap her own excuse. “We shall rest here.”

Their guides tried to suggest Ilisidi sit and rest, but Ilisidi had her cane in hand and walked—walked in wide, aimless patterns, as far as the clear space allowed.

Not unwise, Bren thought. He walked a bit himself, trying to keep his legs under him, trying to get circulation back to his nether regions, and not to let the ankle give. Careless of dignity at this point, he swung his arms and bent and stretched, feeling the pain already, and knowing it would be worse before it was better. He owned, he very much recalled, a saddle more to his proportions. Unfortunately that saddle was, like the mechieti he owned, off in Malguri, at the other end of the continent, and for now, and in public, the only cure he could apply was three tablets of mild painkiller, which he carried in his baggage.

He swallowed the dose, washed it down with spring water, then sank down gingerly on a decaying log near the baggage, in the general area where the rest of them were gathering, to wait for it to take effect. The rangers had set up a small stove, and were heating water, for tea, one ever so earnestly hoped. He watched as other utensils appeared from various baggage. Food appeared.

His appetite began to override the pain. Food, hot food, and not concentrate bars. The fire seemed reckless, if they were being followed. The smell of smoke carried. But a hot meal was oh, so welcome. He resisted second-guessing the rangers’ judgement.

There were other whistles in the woods, some near, some far. Their guides fell utterly silent and listened for a bit.

“There has been no investigation of the bus, nandiin,” Keimi said, standing by the edge of the clearing. “The Sidonin authority evidently is not particularly zealous. We shall likely receive a message by hand, from another direction. We shall let them retrieve the bus, eventually.”

A whistle sounded startlingly close to them. One of Keimi’s people answered it, and meanwhile business around the stove went on as if nothing alarming had happened. Tea was served, soup was on to boil, water supplied from the spring, in a pot that otherwise served as a packing container. And someone out in the woods was watching, guarding them.

“Mind, we have a human guest,” Ilisidi had said, when they were putting together the meal, and she had her staff watch, personally, every item and spice that went into the stew, for which Bren was entirely grateful. It smelled better and better. Anything would have appealed to him, laden with alkaloids or not, and he would, he thought, have died mostly happy if he could only get a bowlful of what was preparing.

Some little noise attracted their own bodyguards’ attention. “We have others arriving, nandiin,” Keimi said, and Assassins relaxed. Hands left weapons.

In a while more, indeed, while they were ladling out the contents of the pot, which turned out to be a thick stew presented as a sauce on hardtack, other riders turned up, three of them, a woman, two men, these all in mottled dark green not unlike the leaves, on dark, well-kept mechieti.

There were introductions, and the dowager stayed seated, but she inclined her head courteously to each—whose names, it turned out, she already knew.

“Nand’ dowager,” they addressed Ilisidi, with great respect. It appeared, by what conversation flowed, and by the exchange of bows with the two youngsters that had settled by Cajeiri, that these were the parents of the two teenagers, and now they were on much more formal behavior. The elders recalled that they had known Cajeiri as a babe in arms, not the sort of thing a young lad of any species liked to hear recalled in front of his new friends.

But there they were, in the heart of Taiben, where Cajeiri had spent much of his babyhood. And the two teenagers recalled they had met Cajeiri then, if one could meet a toddler in any social sense.

So it was old acquaintance. The chatter went on, in a tumble of particulars for a second or two, entirely displacing adult business, until Ilisidi meaningfully cleared her throat. “There is a better sitting place over near the spring, great-grandson.”

“Mani-ma.” Cajeiri gratefully took the hint and took his two teenaged conversants with him, out of the stream of adult conversation.

“His father’s son,” the older man of the arriving party said. His name was Jeiniri—Bren had noted it; and the woman was his partner in service, Deiso. Those two were the parents. The other man, Cori, was Deiso’s brother.

“In very many ways,” Ilisidi said, “he is his father’s son.” Some quiet current ran in that exchange that Bren could not quite gather, but there was a little tension in the air, and eyes were quickly downcast.

Is there some problem in this meeting? he asked himself, and cast a worried glance at his own staff, who were busy with their supper. Is there some news passed, some particular difficulty, that brought this pair in?

Or have they come in to retrieve their teenaged youngsters from our vicinity? It was a dangerous vicinity, he had no question of that, and it made sense they would feel some awkwardness in saying so. The aiji-dowager and her great-grandson being the gravitational center of that danger, sensible parents would want those two and all the rest of the young children and elderly away from them. It would be a relief, to have the vulnerable part of their band withdraw to safety.

So here went another set of youngsters out of Cajeiri’s reach, he thought, if they did that, and he was sorry, immensely sorry they could not send Cajeiri to safety too.

They finished eating. They took tea, a solemn, quiet time.

Community was established. Food and tea had gone the rounds. Then it was permissible to get down to bare-faced questions.

“How many of the staff survive, nadiin?” Cenedi asked their hosts directly. “One apprehends they are fairly well scattered.”

“The lodge is mostly intact, nadi,” Keimi said. “And the Kadigidi have attempted to base there, but to no good, not for them.”

That covered bloody actions, Bren thought.

And still that strange reserve.

“You wonder, do you not,” Ilisidi said sharply, “who claims the succession.” Her mouth made a hard line, and she leaned on her cane, which rested at a steep angle before her. All around the fire, eyes fixed mostly on the ground. And the cane lifted, pointing. “There is the succession, nadiin, should it come to that.” The cane angled toward the spring, and Cajeiri.

A scarcely perceptible tension breathed out of the newcomers as they followed that indication. Not an eastern claimant, then, but an heir of the central provinces, a Ragi like themselves; and no proclamation in the solemn halls of government provoked more tension or more relief than this. Bren himself found his breath stopped, and when they looked back to Ilisidi, Taibeni heads bowed in deep, deep respect.

“Nand’ dowager,” Keimi said solemnly.

That old, old divide between east and west, that had once, in the previous aiji’s death, voted Tabini into office, passing over Ilisidi: too eastern, too much a foreigner to manage the Western Association. It had been a bitter dose.

And Ilisidi knew these people, knew where their man’chi lay, and gained everything in one stroke. The whole atmosphere had changed.

“So what happened here, nadiin?” Ilisidi asked, leaning on that cane again. “And where is he?”

A small silence.

“The aiji,” Keimi said, “had come to the lodge for safety. He had intended to send Mercheson-paidhi to Mogari-nai, and he intended to follow, when news came that Murini of the Kadigidi had conducted assassinations in the legislature itself, and lords had scattered for immediate safety. Sabotage was aimed at the shuttles, and Tabini-aiji dispatched staff immediately to prevent that. He intended, himself, to go to Mogari-nai and communicate directly with Ogun-aiji up on the station. The shuttles could not launch: they were in preparation, as best we understand, but we have never heard that they launched.”

Bad news. Terrible news.

And Tabini had made a critical choice, to neglect all other matters and protect the shuttle fleet, as an irreplaceable connection to the space station, to his mission, to the ship and its business. Some atevi might not understand that, might not forgive it, in an aiji who had already committed so ruinously much effort into the space program, to join with humans.

“It was suggested by the staff,” Deiso said further, “that he be on one shuttle, and that some of us would go with him. He refused, nand’ dowager, and said it was impossible, anyway. He said that he belonged to the earth, and that he would never expect us to die for him while he sat safe in the heavens. By all we know, the spaceport is still in provincial hands, the shuttle grounded, but intact, and the crews in hiding. The Kadigidi have taken the shuttle facility at Shejidan, however, and maintain a guard there.”

A profound relief. The investment, the unique materials, the irreplaceable staff… protected, thus far. But now that the ship was back at the station, the Kadigidi and their supporters would know that the shuttle there and the one on Mospheira represented a dire threat to them. Destroying it, or taking control of it, would become a priority.

“And where is my grandson?” Ilisidi asked.

“No one knows, aiji-ma, but he left eastward—whether skirting through Atageini lands, or more directly inward, we do not know.”

A border where there was only uneasy peace, an old, old feud within the Ragi Association—not often a bloody one—that had been patched within the larger Western Association, the aishidi’tat, first by pragmatic diplomacy, then by the marriage of Tabini-aiji to an Atageini consort… Cajeiri’s mother.

And Cajeiri, with his two companions, had quietly gotten up and moved back to stand nearby, listening, lip bit between his teeth.

“The dowager proposes to go ask Lord Tatiseigi where his man’chi lies,” Cenedi said, and Bren’s heart did two little thuds.

But of course. Of course that question had to be posed, and posed face to face, if it was to have the best chance of a favorable response. Man’chi worked that way. Ilisidi could ask that question by phone, supposing they found a phone, and that would indeed shock her former lover to a certain degree, perhaps jolt him enough to get the truth out of him. But he might equally as well puff himself up and take personal meaning out of the fact that she had used the phone, not confronting him—and then the shock would diminish into recalcitrance at best. Nothing on earth would match the emotional impact of personal appearance, on Atageini land, and very little could match Ilisidi’s force if she got inside his guard. If there was anything calculated to catch the old gentleman at a disadvantage, if there was any appearance of the old regime capable of shaking him to his emotional core—Ilisidi could.

And Ilisidi with the advantage of guardianship over Cajeiri, half Atageini, himself, and destined to rule, by what Ilisidi had just declared—canny politician that she was… oh, damned right she had a hand to play.

If they lived long enough. If the Atageini had stayed free of Kadigidi forces. If, if, and if.

Granted they had set something in motion back in Adaran, and stirred things up at Sidonin. They were about to do something far, far more dangerous.

He decided on another cup of tea and kept quiet. This was an atevi matter, and not one where the paidhi-aiji owned a particularly valid theory of how to proceed. This choice depended on emotional hard-wiring, the psychology of the business—it was ninety percent psychology, where it involved convincing people to risk their lives to support an eight-year-old successor. The same way the mechieti stayed, unrestrained, where their leader stayed, this group just sitting round the fire was doing something, arguing things, exerting persuasions and enlisting arguments that human nerves might perceive, but couldn’t quite feel.

Excitement was in the air, resolution in the direction of glances, the attitude of heads, the expression in golden eyes, shimmering the other side of the small gas flame. Dusk had settled deep as they heated more water for another, easier round of tea.

The fate of the aishidi’tat was potentially being decided, right here, between one great player and a handful of lesser ones. Tabini’s choice under threat had been to come to them, and even absent, he had for months been a nebulous presence, whether dead or alive, sustaining them in their fight. With Ilisidi and the boy came an emotional pressure that Ilisidi, canny as she was, seized, directed, bent to her own purpose.

One saw how she had survived coups and assassinations—why she was alive and many of her enemies were dust.

“Tea?” one of Keimi’s people asked, and poured for him. He sipped it, feeling, despite the painkiller, the early twinges of what was going to be a truly excruciating day in the saddle tomorrow. Cajeiri had dropped down to sit with the two teens, all of them listening, questions in abeyance, feeling—God knew what.

Sometimes the paidhi’s job was best done by keeping his mouth firmly shut.

The folk of Taiben seemed at least not to forget him, in his silence. He had to refuse another serving of hardtack, but he sopped up several cups of tea before he reached capacity. And the discussion went not that much longer before Ilisidi declared she was tired and wished to sleep.

Bren was glad enough to lie down. He was unwilling for Jago to lie beside him and make their relationship that apparent to strangers—it was her dignity he was thinking of, in settling in a narrow spot, between two tree roots. But she sat with Banichi and Cenedi and the rest in a second conference with the three latest-come rangers—perhaps asking particulars of trails, quasi-boundaries, and affiliations, not to mention rumors from outside… all that sort of thing their Guild would be interested to know, on which they did their job.

Trust at least when his staff slept, they would sleep, under ranger guard, far more soundly than he would, with half-formed speculations and useless plans swarming through his head.

“But they will come here now, nadiin,” he heard Banichi point out. “They will not ignore our landing. They must suspect our route.”

Comforting, Bren thought to himself. He shifted onto his back and stared at the branches moving gently above his head, against a sky ragged with cloud. A wind was getting up, that line of cloud, perhaps, that they had seen at sea, now reaching the mainland. It might rain.

He heard the distant voices of Banichi’s conference, heard small rush of water flowing, and, nearer at hand, eight-year-old Cajeiri astonishing two teenagers with the account of how he had gone aboard an alien spaceship, and how their kyo had been extremely fond of Bindanda’s teacakes…

Far too much information to be scattering around the countryside. Information, in strictest sense, that should be classified. Information that he could use to his own advantage.

But it was late for that now. And as Cajeiri told it, the kyo, who could slag a space station with their weaponry, were in fact capable of reason. The boy had helped find that aspect of them. He was a hero in his own right, and was certainly basking in the admiration of his audience. Would he cheat the boy of that, with a request to keep it all quiet?

No, he would not.

He shut his eyes, still alive—he reminded himself—still alive after the shuttle ride, still alive after a very remarkable stretch of hours in which their only rest had been slow baking under the tarp, and slow freezing on blocks of ice, and a long ride on a very uncomfortable saddle, all in the fear of being shot or captured. The ground still felt as if it was moving under him, still with the thump and clack of the rails, or the thump and heave of the boat cutting through water, or the shuttle’s tires rolling rapidly down the pavement.

Just too damned much moving in the last few days. And too little real sleep. At the very edge of oblivion he forgot where he was, except he was down, and they’d landed, and the wind was moving, and atevi voices were around him. Jago was close by. And the mechieti were ripping the leaves off trees.

He could trust that, he decided. The solid earth was reliable. He finally let go all defenses, and did sleep, deeply.

He waked by daylight, with people moving about, with breakfast cooking, an aroma of crisping meat. As sore as he had anticipated being, he took three more pills, then set himself to rights, straightened his by now disreputable queue, shaved the old-fashioned way—no servants to comb his hair, dress him, all the quick attentions that had started most of his days in recent years. He missed Narani and Bindanda—missed their society and their quick briefing on everything in the household. But he found something morally refreshing, being sore in very inconvenient places, sitting on a rock beside a gurgling spring.

Jago brought him hot tea, his one special attention, and dropped to her haunches in front of him.

“How are you this morning, Bren-ji?”

“Very well, really. Will we ride today?”

“We must, Bren-ji,” she said.

“If the dowager can do it, nadi-ji, I certainly have no cause to complain.”

Jago folded her arms across her knees and leaned close. “We have a plan, Bren-ji, a dangerous plan. The dowager wishes to inquire at Tirnamardi.”

Tatiseigi’s country estate, about half a day’s ride out of Heitisi, the cluster of medium-sized towns that was the economic center of the Atageini holdings. Dangerous didn’t begin to describe it. “I heard, last night.”

“There is a relatively safe approach,” Jago said, “through the hunting reserve, which is contiguous with this woods, which both Taiben and the Atageini manage.”

As the animals they hunted were in common, so certain territory overlapped, and game-chase became a matter of hazy rights and who protested—civilly, at least modestly civilly, recently. One hoped it persisted.

“From there,” Jago said in a low voice, “we may be able to reach our Guild.”

Oh, now it got dangerous.

“By phone?” he asked, doubting it.

“It would be far better, Bren-ji, if we were to go ourselves.”

He didn’t like it. She knew he didn’t like it. He reserved a thought to himself: If you go, I go, and he was sure they’d try to outmaneuver him unless he strictly forbade it.

“What do you think, Jago-ji? Is venturing to Shejidan a good idea?”

Jago looked at the ground, then at him. “We consider this a risk, and we have reservations as to whether to attempt Tirnamardi, or to bypass Atageini territory and keep within Taiben. The whole question is where Lord Tatiseigi stands in the current crisis. The dowager is firm in her notion. Cenedi has doubts, too.”

“Cajeiri will be at risk.”

A second hesitation. “Not from Lord Tatiseigi,” she said. “Nor, we think, would the dowager be. You, on the other hand, Bren-ji—”

“Have no particular favor in his sight. I know. I enjoy very little favor from the majority of the population of the mainland, at the moment, one would think.”

He had never been particularly acceptable to this very conservative lord, who disliked human influence and all modern intrusions.

“There is misperception, perhaps.”

Loyally put. He did not think, however, that he had yet reached the foundations of Jago’s thinking.

“Do you, personally, think that Tabini-aiji is dead?” he asked.

“We have had no proof,” she said, and that was a delicate, revelatory matter: they had seen no proof they accepted, and therefore had no emotional disconnection of man’chi. They were, she and Banichi, still functioning as if their highest man’chi of all was intact, and that opinion would color all others, affect all other decisions, define all other logic—whether to go to the Guild, whether to bend every effort to empower Ilisidi, whether to agree to this mission entering Tatiseigi’s lands.

“If I were not with you,” he said—delicate, delicate, to probe an ateva’s man’chi too deeply—“would you now leave the dowager, Jago-ji?”

“Unlikely that we would,” she said. “But what she is doing, Bren-ji, places the heir and all his aspirations in Lord Tatiseigi’s hands. That notion has to be reckoned with. If Tabini-aiji is alive, this risk is a serious consideration, and we are not able to prevent the dowager doing it.”

He hadn’t quite seen through to that unhappy fact.

“Tatiseigi has,” he developed her thought, “every personal interest in seeing Cajeiri sit in Shejidan.”

“And that means he has proportionately less interest in seeing Tabini alive.”

“God.” In Mosphei’. He loosened the wilted lace at his throat. “But his interests cannot involve alienating Cajeiri by attacking his father. That move the boy would never forgive.”

“That would be one constraint on him, nandi—besides the operational difficulty of such a move, the fact that the camp opposing the aiji does not place any reliance on him, and, perhaps, whatever regard he holds for Lady Damiri. There is a complex of reasons. Also, Tabini would move to get Cajeiri back, if Tatiseigi were to take him in his charge, and Tabini-aiji with his guard is no small threat. If Lord Tatiseigi made a move to lay personal claim to the heir, then everyone would take sides. Violently.”

The denouement of the machimi, the moment in the play where loyalties suddenly came crystal-clear, and atevi had to act.

“Tatiseigi’s ambition is abated, not dead, Bren-ji. This is our thinking. He has always aspired to rule.”

“And he cannot. If the hasdrawad would not elect the dowager, they would never elect him.”

“The hasdrawad may have suffered changes in membership, during the present troubles.”

“That is so.”

“The boy, however, with him as regent—would have far less trouble being confirmed. If his father were dead, and Damiri being Atageini—Tatiseigi would indeed rise in importance. This move of the dowager’s, bringing us under his roof, is fraught with hazards.”

“Do you think, Jago-ji, that the dowager herself might be in more danger than she thinks?”

“Possibly.” A frown creased Jago’s brow. “Possibly so, Bren-ji. Sometimes, lacking certain instincts, you do see astonishingly clearly.”

“Not lacking my own species’ instincts, I assure you, and this hazard is understandable. Can we not talk her out of it? Can you reason with Cenedi?”

“Cenedi has tried to persuade her: he wishes to settle her in Taiben and then venture against the Kadigidi himself. Cenedi himself knows the risk, knows your man’chi. He would not blame us for withdrawing from this venture and trying to find Tabini. Nor, I think, would the dowager herself blame us.”

It was an absolute wilderness, the forest of atevi emotions, atevi decisions, atevi snap judgments, all rooted in urges humans didn’t feel at that depth, at that intensity. “She is counting, is she not, Jago-ji, on the boy having a strong emotional force with his uncle?”

“Counting very heavily on her own, one believes, nandi, considering the boy’s last emotional impact on his uncle was set in a wide expanse of concrete.”

He was caught off guard. Laughed, a brief sneeze of laughter, despite the grimness of the situation. Tatiseigi was a notorious curmudgeon, who had suffered considerably from public amusement at the incident in question. And one did fear Tatiseigi would not find Cajeiri that much improved, not from his conservative point of view—a sober thought which instantly killed the laughter, and did nothing to form a rational conclusion. If Jago was perplexed, caught between two loyalties, he was caught in his own. He had their welfare at heart, and the boy’s. And Tabini’s, granted the aiji was still alive. And he had the whole outcome to consider, and the whole human-atevi-kyo problem to weigh into the equation.

While Ilisidi, damn her, had always been an incredibly nervy, canny player in atevi politics, and he had no wish to undermine her best effort, if she could shock the fence-sitting lord into alliance. There he met his own division of common sense and emotion. She might be making a monumental mistake. Or a very smart move.

But at the bottom of the stack, on the scale at which they operated, he had no right to choose personal safety. He was a resource, a resource of information and defense for the fallen regime, one it could no more afford to lose than it could afford to lose Ilisidi or Cajeiri, if Tabini himself was alive. But in order to be useful, he had to be active and get the information public in the most credible way. He had his own reputation to restore, and if he could not defend their mission and its outcome to one fairly civilized old man under Ilisidi’s influence, he stood precious little chance of persuading the rest of the continent.

“One cannot hide in the bushes,” he said. “We did not come back from space to do that, Jago-ji. One has no real idea how to find Tabini. One rather thinks he may find us if we can make just a modest amount of noise and if Atageini territory is open to him. And the things that Tabini did that were right, that were essential—that succeeded—these things have to be vindicated to the public at large, do they not, Jago-ji? If I were to separate from Ilisidi, I, as much as you, need to go to Shejidan. I need to speak to your Guild, and to the legislature. I need to give people the information I have. I have to defend Tabini’s decisions for everyone to hear. Words, Jago, words are my whole defense. Words stand a chance of changing minds. I have to gain what respect I can recover, starting, one supposes, with this very influential lord.”

A moment of silence, then, Jago’s gold gaze steady and honest. “You are not necessarily wrong, Bren-ji.”

“Good.”

“So,” Jago said, “our way from here—”

“Lies through Atageini territory,” Bren said. “So our intent may have diverged ever so slightly from the dowager’s, but our path logically does not.”

“One concurs, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “I shall tell Banichi.”

She did not go back to the conference. She went and sat apart from that gathering, on a rock, arms on her knees, waiting. In a little time Banichi came and squatted near her.

Bren continued fussing with his lace and dusting his boots. The conference at the fireside broke up, and the young people, who had been settled in their own conspiracy over near the mechieti, began to look for saddles. Cajeiri was limping a little this morning. He didn’t complain overmuch about it, doggedly maintaining his dignity, one suspected, particularly in front of the two older youngsters, who were inured to the saddle, and who had likely never in their lives felt this particular pain.

Ilisidi had to be helped up to her feet, but she walked and stood, somehow, shaking off assistance, and ordered Nawari to saddle her mechieti.

Bren figured he had best go see to his own gear. He thought he could tell which mechieti he had ridden yesterday, and which was its tack, and no one else objected to his selection of gear. Tano and Algini left consultations and hurried to help him. He decided he was very grateful for that, having disgraced himself last evening, and having no wish to contest the creature’s tusks, as sore as he already was.

Meanwhile the small side conference between Banichi and Jago had broken up fairly inconspicuously, as Banichi and Jago sought their own tack and Banichi found the means to talk to Tano and Algini.

And did the dowager take note that there had been a planning session of his own staff, or did Cenedi possibly miss it? Bren took the rein from Tano. He gritted his teeth and got into the saddle, with Algini’s help.

Pain was bearable, if it was familiar pain. It would pass in an hour or so, even without the painkiller to hasten the hour. A little gentle riding would bring its own numbness.

Their direction was the same direction they had been tending yesterday. Cajeiri and Deiso’s two teenagers all rode together now, the ranger youngsters riding with considerable skill, compelling their mechieti to ignore their ordinary order, likely with their parents’ beasts, and stay near Cajeiri, an argument that occasionally annoyed the rest of the column, but they had their way and stayed.

For his own part, he was very glad to be somewhat behind, and to have his mechieti bored and quiescent. He rode quietly in line, seeing Banichi and Jago conferring with Cenedi up ahead, a conversation undoubtedly being overheard by the dowager. There might be close questions, or implied close questions from Cenedi, about the private conference, and Banichi might even answer them fairly honestly, since their intentions, while somewhat separate, lay in the same direction. It was safer to have Cenedi well-acquainted with their notions and their logic.

The dowager did not comment on the matter. Bren watched, unable to hear those quiet voices above the general movement of the mechieti. It was a peaceful ride, a quiet ride, few people speaking even to immediate companions, and it was only belatedly that he realized the oldest rider and the youngest children were no longer with them. The whistles from elsewhere in the woods continued, fewer in number, but perfectly audible.

Toward afternoon: “We are inside Atageini lands now,” Jago rode back to tell him.

He had noticed an upright stone a moment ago. He had learned to pay attention to anomalies, even when he had no idea what they might be.

And he had not heard a whistle in at least an hour.

“One remarks a certain silence here,” he said to her.

“The rangers will not signal near this boundary,” Jago said. “Atageini hunters cross here. None recently, by the look of things.”

“Does that indicate, nadi-ji, that the Atageini avoid crossing into Taiben?”

“It is worth remarking, nandi. We have no word of any hostilities, however, and none of any intrusions.”

“Inform my ignorance, Jago-ji. What do you think it would it mean?”

“Possibly that Lord Tatiseigi wishes no incident with Taiben in these perilous times. Possibly he wishes none of his hunters be caught and questioned by the Taibeni, which might give away too much of his intentions and his position, even if his intention is to stay neutral. And possibly some installation hereabouts has frightened the game away and there is nothing to bring hunters here.”

“Electronic surveillance?”

“We have picked up a signal.”

The subtler elements of Guild technology, which he was sure some of their staff carried, and the nastier elements of Guild actions possible on the border they were crossing. Wires. Traps. Not likely to stop others of the same Guild, but enough to slow them down.

He had noted Cenedi had traded mounts with Ilisidi this morning, taking the more fractious herd-leader for himself. Banichi had also pushed his mechieti up ahead of Ilisidi’s, he and Cenedi riding first and second in the column the last few minutes, a small indication of worry. Theirs were very experienced eyes, apt to spot specific things even a ranger might not, and that the mechieti might sense, but not know the danger.

He himself knew entirely too much about such devices, and their more lethal adjuncts, which were ordinarily deployed in secure places in Shejidan. One scarcely expected them to be placed out here in the depths of the woods, where roaming animals might trip them too often, with bloody result, not to mention the provocation it posed against Taiben.

And it was not without significance, he was sure, that Jago stayed closer by him now, with Tano and Algini staying very close behind him. Ever since they had passed that stone, their progress had acquired the caution of Guild very much on the alert.

The woods thinned, and there was open land visible, beyond the screen of trees. They were still within forest, riding that ridge of low hills, Bren recalled from his railroad-building days, which was the nebulous boundary between Taiben and the Atageini.

Soon, sure enough, they exited the woods onto open meadow, and took a downward pitch, now firmly within Atageini territory and evidently free of monitoring or threat. From the broad slope of the high meadow, they could see a village, an Atageini village, far down and across extensive grassland, past winding brown hedgerows, into cultivated fields gold with ripened crops or dead brown with harvested stubble. A little haze overlay equally grassy hills beyond.

It all had a quaint look, as many small villages did, hereabouts, little places nestled in sheltered nooks, not all of them to this day using electric lights. One saw no electric lines in this province, no more than in Taiben: installations like the monitoring equipment they suspected back there had to be battery-powered. The siting of the railroad right of way had been a particularly bitter controversy here, and in Taiben, and the train when it did go through had been slowed by Atageini insistence that the tracks, where allowed, should follow old farm-to-market routes. It meant a curving, inefficient progress that prevented trains going as fast through Atageini territory as they ran elsewhere… and they ran not at all through Taiben, except on the very border. He knew the whole untidy history. He had had to mediate a dispute on the junction of two regional rail lines that had, finally, finally gotten Atageini permission to lay track to that set of villages.

No sign of the disputed rail from their vantage. Only isolated copses of woods and rolling meadow, intermittent with plowed fields, until it grew too dark even for atevi eyes to be sure there were no traps.

Then they settled down for another camp, and, daringly, a hot cup of tea, a hot bowl of soup.

And another dose of analgesic.

Beside the little stove, Keimi and his remaining people announced their intention of going back in the morning, back to Taiben land, back to organize a second meeting with Ilisidi once she left this territory and proceeded northward to gather support there, as she intended to do.

And, in the conversation that followed supper and tea, there were statements of gratitude, hopes for their success, concerns for their welfare. It was all the Taibeni could offer at this point: Taiben rangers were persona non grata where they were, already. The district had a long, long history of cross-border forays and, before the aishidi’tat, of outright warfare.

So they would be committing themselves to Ilisidi’s plan in the morning. Bren found himself a flat place where no one would tread on him and went to bed early, absolutely exhausted. Traps, wires, old feuds… he had reached that stage of exhaustion and compliance when even terror for his life and the world’s welfare were no barrier to sleep, deep as a pit and dreamless, so far as he could remember.

He lifted his head, startled, when he heard stirring about, when daylight was at least faintly discernible to human eyes. His head objected to the sudden elevation. His eyes wanted to shut. He wanted to drop back down to the uncompromising ground and lie there another day, perhaps a week. An experimental movement of one leg convinced him that the saddle was, oh, no, not going to be comfortable today at all.

But staff had more important things on their minds this morning than playing servant to him. The Taibeni were to leave them. He levered himself up on his hands and knees, and got up, brushing off the clothes that by now were truly showing signs of wear. He had loosened his queue. He rebraided and tied it. He had neglected to take his boots off, and now he was sorry for it, but he limped about a sluggish morning routine, trying to make himself look as presentable as possible—the dignity of a lord was a protection to his staff, and he did as much as he could for himself, shaving, picking small bits of detritus off his coat, the effects of sleeping under a tree that shed.

“How are you this morning, Bren-ji?” Jago brought him a cup of tea from the Taibeni stove, abundantly steaming in the morning chill.

“Awake,” he said, fumbling with the analgesic. Human-specific. He had no help for his companions. “Minimally awake, Jago-ji.” She had been with him long enough to know he never, ever waked as she did, full of energy, whether or not it was daylight—he wondered where she got the moral strength, this morning. He wondered, too, that they had heated the stove, but it was bitterly chill this morning, and he supposed it would cool rapidly for packing.

Beyond anything, he was grateful for the hot tea, and washed down a nutrient bar and his pills. The knees were not quite so bad as yesterday. The seat was, if possible, worse.

He was so muzzy-headed with early waking and breakfast he failed to realize when the stove was packed up, failed to see the preparations for separate departure going on apace, but he saw Keimi and his people were saddling up, going.

So Cajeiri was losing his two companions, Deiso’s youngsters. He saw looks being exchanged, saw a glum unhappiness in Cajeiri’s countenance, as the boy stood with hands locked behind him, watching the separation of baggage.

The two young people kept looking back at him, too, while packing and beginning to saddle up. They spoke together. And Cajeiri never stopped gazing at them, with a dejection in his whole bearing that bespoke more than a childish disappointment.

The young woman took a hesitant step toward Cajeiri, away, then went back to her father and mother, and bent in a profound bow.

“We wish to go with the young aiji,” the girl said distressedly. Not I, we. “We have to, father.”

The father was clearly distressed. So was his partner, and the uncle. But he said something Bren could not hear, and spoke to the girl, and then went and spoke to his son. So did the others of the family.

Then the two came back to Cajeiri and bowed, choosing to go with him, evidently, with parental permission, the girl and then the boy extending their hands to his, emotions brimming over in the moment so that eavesdropping on them seemed all but indecent.

Dared one think—?

Because a curious thing was proceeding. Cajeiri gripped their hands one after the other, and bit his lip fiercely, and looked as moved as it was possible for a reserved young lad to be in public.

Man’chi. That emotion. That binding force, that sense of other-self. What had almost been broken was made whole all in an instant: it was a choice of directions and attachments, and there wasn’t a damned thing a father or a mother with safety concerns or a great-grandmother with her own plans could do about it.

A little chill went over him. Do I see what I think I see? he wondered, and was too embarrassed to look toward his own staff, who themselves felt such an intimate thing for him. He’d never actually seen it work—well, there had been the time he had bolted from cover to reach Banichi and Jago under fire, an action that so scandalized their concept of proper behavior that Jago had been willing to shake his teeth out. He had been lucky enough to gain a staff he could absolutely trust, and, from his side, love, but the shift of loyalties had generally been so subtle and so internal with him and his staff, all of them sober, older creatures than teenagers, and while he never doubted deep emotion was there—and felt it—he had never seen a case of man’chi shifting, except in the machimi plays.

But the fact was—those two young people were utterly honest, and Cajeiri was, and there it all was, a life-choice. They hadn’t broken bonds with their family, but they’d formed something else, something that had, in a day, taken over their lives, totally shifted their focus. They were about at that stage when humans hit first love, and had to be counseled and persuaded against tidal forces that could shipwreck their whole lives…

Nothing of sexual attraction, here, not in man’chi. But clearly it was a sort of chemistry, and, a choice might be just as problematic—for Taibeni youngsters dragged into danger of their lives and a Ragi prince who, two years from now, might have made a more mature, political judgement.

“Young persons,” Ilisidi said severely.

“Mani-ma.” Cajeiri pulled his young followers over to Ilisidi, and they bowed, and he bowed, all of which she accepted with a deep frown.

“This will be dangerous, nadiin,” she said to them.

“Yes, aiji-ma,” the young man said.

“Names.”

“Antaro, aiji-ma,” the girl said; and, “Jegari, aiji-ma,” the boy, both under Ilisidi’s head to foot scrutiny.

“What, sixteen?”

“Fifteen, nearly sixteen, aiji-ma.” The boy answered.

Twice Cajeiri’s age. That made no difference in what they felt. It by no means affected rank, or precedence.

“So,” Ilisidi said, and gave a nod and leaned on her cane, then looked at the parents, another exchange of bows, hers and theirs.

And Cajeiri—Cajeiri was incredibly happy, solemn, but his whole being aglow as he went off with his companions—from dejected, he hurried to deal with his own mechieti, to make himself ready, to do everything himself. They wanted to help him, but let him manage what an eight-year-old could.

Jago turned up at Bren’s side, to help him saddle up. So did Tano. They looked solemn, themselves.

He looked a question at them, but they had no immediate answer. There were some things which, if he asked them a plain question, would be several days explaining, and no greater understanding at the end.

Now, God, the parents had to be upset—but they showed no inclination to go along. How could they, if the next ride took them down into Atageini territory, where their presence would not help negotiations at all?

Neither, the thought occurred to him, would this young pair.

Damn, he thought, arriving at, perhaps, the thoughts that were racing through several atevi minds, but never, of course, the young minds in question.

“Nandi.” Algini had his mechieti saddled for him. He took Tano’s help getting up, and hit the saddle with, oh, the expected pain. In the periphery of his vision he saw, to be sure, a leave-taking, Cajeiri with the two Taibeni youngsters, after which Keimi and the parents and everyone else rode away, back toward Taiben lands.

There was a moment of quiet. Then a burst of energy as Cajeiri went to mount up, with his associates’ help, as if the whole world was made new around them. The dowager accepted Cenedi’s assistance to mount, and, curiously, to Bren’s eye, she had a satisfaction about her this morning that said, indeed, she was not that displeased, not nearly as much as their situation might indicate.

So there were still nuances he failed to understand.

They started off, the young people planted firmly in the center of the column, with the dowager, and with him. For a while he listened to Nawari instructing the young people, advising the new arrivals what to do and what contingencies to consider if they should come under fire.

And the dowager sternly advising Cajeiri that if he picked shelter, he should now adjust his thinking and pick shelter wide enough for three.

Hell of a thing, he said to himself. Hell of a thing for three kids to have to think of. The older generation had a few things to answer for.

But then—under different circumstances, they might not have met at all. Man’chi might have fallen out differently. Tabini and Damiri and Ilisidi herself might have carefully managed what susceptible young persons came into contact with the heir, at what times, with careful consideration as to what associations they represented and what possible alliances they brought.

What governs what attraction takes hold? he wondered, without answers. What sets off the spark, that hits one hard at eight, and the other two blithely unattached to any loyalty but their parents, evidently, until they’re midteens?

They hit a long slope, bound downward, now, into the treeless meadowlands. A herd of teigi grazed in the distance. They would not be legitimate prey for another few months, in the atevi rules of season, but the teigi had no instinctive knowledge of seasons and kabiu. Heads went up and the herd bounded off at the first whisper of their presence. The wind had been out of the north, across the slope, though it had been shifting, and now it came full around out of the west, at their backs, in some force. A little spatter of rain came down on them, quickly abated, but with hints of thunder behind them.

They rode down one meadow and up to the crest of a long roll of the land, where they had their first view of the eastern mountains, a blue haze in the distance, above a long slant of meadow and cultivated fields, even the brown stripe of a farm-to-market road. That would lead to some larger town.

They avoided that direction. Wind and rain-spatter at their backs, they turned northeast, toward the heart of Atageini territory, deeper and deeper.

Further and further onto the tolerance and mercy of Lord Tatiseigi, who surely knew by now that intruders had crossed his borders.

Deeper and deeper into danger, the frail dowager, an eight-year-old boy and a pair of Taibeni children—and a human, whom Lord Tatiseigi had only grudgingly tolerated in the first place. Vulnerable, he kept thinking. And vulnerability was entirely unlike Ilisidi—on whom a supplicant’s role sat very, very strangely.

God, he thought. She wouldn’t. Would she?

Would Ilisidi, to protect her great-grandson and secure her own bloodline in the succession, harbor any notion of abandoning Tabini as aiji and joining with Tatiseigi in a coup, a shift of man’chi as sudden, as illogical, and as catastrophic as what he had just witnessed? She had always wanted to rule.

It was a turn straight out of the machimi. Too damn many movies. He was far out of the habit of the classic drama. His thinking had gone into human lines, which had governed politics on the ship. Down here the priorities were very, very different.

“Do I see worry on your face, paidhi-ji?”

“One relies, as ever, on your honesty, aiji-ma. Are we going to Tirnamardi to fight, to negotiate—” Never leave a logical set at ill-omened two. She knew there was a third thing coming. “Or to make new arrangements?”

An aged map of lines rearranged itself subtly, a wicked gleam in her eye. “No one else would dare ask such a question, paidhi.”

“Because atevi follow, aiji-ma. Humans have to figure out the path.”

“Some follow us. Some follow others.”

“But the paidhi has no instinct to tell him which way the wind is blowing, aiji-ma. One assumes there is logic in what you do. May I know what it is?”

“Purity defines you, paidhi-ji. As far as you travel, it always defines you.”

His face flushed slightly. He could not help it. He was indeed very naïve, in certain regards, and knew it, and Ilisidi smiled at him, a subtle smile.

“What you witnessed makes you think of such things, does it, paidhi-aiji?”

“It teaches me. It makes me question what I know.”

“We value you,” she said. “Our compass. Our true lodestone of virtue.”

“One is glad of some usefulness, aiji-ma.” He was not comforted. The old spark had entered the dowager’s eye this morning, ever since that turn of events in the camp. Ilisidi in this mode was dangerous. Lethal.

And sometimes frighteningly honest. She reached out a hand and touched his arm.

“Protect the truth, paidhi-ji. Do not swerve from that. We wondered when, not if, you would come to consult us about the future.”

His face still burned.

“And what future, aiji-ma? One regrets not to know, but one has no understanding at all.”

“Nor will you. Nor can you. Nor can we. We will know when we see Tatiseigi.”

Was it all that nebulous, that much a dice throw, that even Tatiseigi himself would not know until then? Tatiseigi would have to see her. They would have to size one another up, for resolution, strength—and plans, which might include one or the other of them making a power grab.

Or at least thinking about taking hostages.

She rode forward, leaving him, having said as much as she chose to say. He reined back a little.

“It was well done, Bren-ji,” Jago said, riding next to him. “Well done, to speak to her. She had questions about what you might be thinking, which she may have satisfied.”

“I had to try,” he said. “But I learned absolutely nothing. Except that a great deal is still up in the air.”

“Up in the air,” Jago said, amused, sometimes, by his translation of Mosphei’ idiom. “Baji-naji,” she rendered it, the dice-fall of the universe, the give and take in the design.

The design always survived. The pieces might not.

There was quiet in the column after that. The youngsters talked in whispers even human ears could detect over the general noise of movement.

They took to the trees again, a wooded district, Cenedi still leading. When they came out again, on a ridge overlooking a broad expanse of cultivated land, and the distant cluster of small towns, visible clear to the swell of horizon that obscured the eastern mountains, the sun was behind the woods at their backs, and the light was growing dim with twilight. The cloud had begun to rumble with thunder, advising them that clearing the edge of the trees and getting to the lowlands might be a good idea.

Bren absolutely had no idea where they were now. He asked Jago, who gave him village names.

“Within an hour’s ride of estate land,” she said, “at the pace we set.”

“That close.” He was dismayed. He had rather thought they would be getting wet tonight, camping in the open. He was not that much encouraged to know they were that close.

He hoped to God they didn’t run into trouble. He fished after another analgesic. He was sure everyone in the party was suffering, excepting, of course, Antaro and Jegari, who were disgustingly blithe and bright even at this late hour.

At least Cajeiri had someone specifically looking after him and answering his questions, providing him the instinctual moves his two years on the ship hadn’t taught him. Besides them, Nawari was back there, bringing up the rear, protection for the youngsters.

No question that Cenedi, who had been all his career with Ilisidi, was going to stay with her, no matter what happened: he would not divert himself to care for anyone else, come hell or high water, as the saying went.

God, he hoped Tatiseigi had not turned coat.

They started downhill again, and their trail broadened toward dusk, broadened and joined a true road, even a maintained road. The air grew cooler as the sun sank, cooler to the point of chill, with a beginning drizzle, and Bren buttoned his coat.

Another space of riding, and a dark wall, a hedge, loomed across the road, in the gathering dark. He looked concentratedly at it and saw a dim barrier in their path. A gate. A metal-grilled gate.

The estate border. Beyond it—they were on Tirnamardi’s grounds, however far they extended.

“Traps, Tano-ji?” he asked.

“Possibly,” Tano said. Algini had ridden up to speak to Banichi some few moments ago, not unprecedented in their trip, but Algini had a particular expertise in nasty devices. Of Cenedi’s men, only Nawari still hung to the rear.

And Cenedi checked their pace markedly, the closer they came to that gate. At a certain point something exploded with an electric snap, and Bren jumped, the mechieti all jumped, and he fought to bring his beast under control.

“What happened?” The dark and the misting rain obscured the riders ahead into twilight shadows. He was afraid for Banichi and Algini, foremost; and Cenedi: there might be worse. Or they had set something off.

Jago had drawn closer to him. “A discouragement to approach, Bren-ji, not lethal. One never likes to surprise a guard—unless one intends to remove him.”

“Someone is there?” In the gathering dark, in the rain, at this remote remove, he had not expected it.

“Assuredly,” Jago said. “And Banichi did not care to approach unheard. That watcher will pay close attention now.”

“We shall ride right up to the gate?”

“We shall ride up. He will come out.”

Bren bit his lip. The watcher was coming to them, that was to say.

And of a sudden, atevi eyes being the better in the dusk: “Tell your lord he has visitors!” Cenedi shouted into the night.

“Who are you, nadi?” a distant voice asked, somewhere behind the gate, and by now the fore of their column had stopped, the rest of them drifting to a halt behind. They were all too exposed, in Bren’s anxious calculation. And in a heartbeat and a glance, he was not sure where Banichi had gotten to, or Algini.

“Escort to a lady of the lord’s personal acquaintance. Tell him so, nadi!”

“I shall relay that, nadi, but best if I had a name!”

A two-heartbeat pause, then, from Cenedi: “Say he will remember when lightning hit the boat.”

“Lightning hit the boat.” Bren could hear the disbelieving mutter from here, in the general hush. Mechieti snorted and shifted, his own included, and he kept the rein just short of taut, tapping slightly with his quirt to restrain a sideward motion, while someone up there was making a phone call.

“Should we move off the road, Jago-ji?”

“Best stay in the saddle. Keep the quirt ready, Bren-ji. If we move, we move.”

There was a small pause. The guard was undoubtedly Guild, undoubtedly had communications with a station somewhere inside the Atageini house, and was asking questions. He was likely not alone, either. It was not the atevi habit that he be out here alone, and one rather thought that in all the brush grown up against the wall, and overtopping it, there might be a gun aimed at them, as somewhere out there Banichi and Algini had moved into protective position.

“Nandi,” the other side called back, this time in a tone of astonishment, “Lord Tatiseigi is bringing the car.”

“No need for that,” Cenedi said, “if you open the gates, nadi. We can meet him halfway.”

There was another small delay. Then the gates yielded outward with a sullen creak of iron.

Bren drew a deep, deep breath. He asked, on its outflow: “Is this good, Jago-ji?”

And her amused answer: “Certainly better than the alternatives.”

Chapter 9

It was a well-maintained and level road, probably, Bren thought, the route by which the lord’s vehicles, when used, would make the trip to the rural market or to the much-debated train station. Rain spatted down, windblown, and lightning lit the rain-pocked dirt under the mechieti’s feet.

And far in the distance two headlights gleamed, wending their way toward them.

Cajeiri and his two companions came up the column, taking advantage of the wider road, to reach the dowager.

“Is that my great-uncle, mani-ma?” Great-uncle, in the polite imprecision of ordinary usage, was easier and more intimate. He was great-uncle to Cajeiri’s mother.

“It should be, indeed, young gentleman. Straighten your collar.”

“Mani-ma.” Cajeiri quickly adjusted the wildly-flying lace.

Bren did a little tidying of his own. And he was very conscious of the gun in his pocket. He was sure all their staff was on the alert. They had only the gatekeepers’ word that the oncoming car represented a welcome at all.

And the guards had shut the gate behind them.

Further and further into the estate, as that car wended toward them, its headlights at times aimed off into shrubbery, at other times casting diffuse light down onto the road in front of them, at last close enough to spotlight the slanting rain-drops.

“Should there be any unanticipated trouble for us, great-grandson,” the dowager said, speaking in the fortunate first-three-plural, “ride for the outer gate. Rely on Nawari. He will open it.”

“Yes, mani-ma.”

The motorcar was not the most modern and efficient, but certainly it sounded impressive. It had probably gone into service in Wilson’s tenure as paidhi, and probably it had traveled less than the distance from Jackson to the north shore in all its years of operation: Bren reckoned so, knowing Tatiseigi’s ways.

It blinded them with its lights as it rumbled up to them, and the mechieti were far from happy with its racket. They milled about and the sky took that moment to add thunder to the mix.

The car braked. A door opened, and a guard bailed out and moved quickly, bringing a move of hands to weapons, but indeed, it was only to open the passenger door and to assist an elderly gentleman to exit into the rain.

Tatiseigi himself, grim old man, outlined in the headlights: he advanced a few paces, squinting and shading his eyes.

Ilisidi rode forward, keeping her mechieti under tight rein, its uncapped tusks a hazard to everyone it might encounter, no respecter of elderly lords.

“ ’Sidi-ji,” the old man said, frowning into the rain. “It is you.”

“It certainly is,” Ilisidi said sharply, “and a pretty mess the world is in, when your gates are shut and guarded by lethal devices, nandi. Is my rascal grandson here?”

“No,” Tatiseigi said. “No. He has been, but he is not. But you are back from this gallivanting about the heavens. And is that half-grown boy my nephew?”

“One offers deepest respect, great-uncle.” Cajeiri was doing very well controlling a restive and annoyed mechieti, which detested facing the lights and that rumbling engine. “Has there been news from my mother, great-uncle?”

Very damned precocious, for eight. But then, Cajeiri had had his great-grandmother for a tutor non-stop for two years, and lost no time seizing the moral initiative.

“No news,” Tatiseigi said shortly, and somewhat rudely. One was not strictly obliged to courtesy with a forward child, and the old man was being rained upon. “Come to the hall for questions. Come to the hall. The deluge is coming. You might ride with me, ’Sidi-ji.”

“Too much effort to get down and get in and get out,” Ilisidi said. “These old bones prefer a short, painful ride. But a glass of brandy and supper would come very welcome when we arrive, not to mention a warm bath, Tati-ji.”

“Then come ahead. Both are available. Is that the paidhi with you?”

“It is, nandi,” Bren said for himself.

“Instigator of this mess,” Tatiseigi muttered, like a curse, and turned away, headed for his car.

So. It was certainly clear where he stood, and abundantly clear, too, the paidhi could stand out in the oncoming rain for all Tatiseigi cared, but at least Tatiseigi did not exclude him from the invitation… whatever his next intentions.

“He is old,” Jago said, not that it moderated the old man’s discourtesy. The old had license, and some used that license freely.

“He is justified,” Bren said in a low voice. “He is completely justified, as far as things on the ground go, Jago-ji. One fears there is no remedy for his opinion except our setting things back in place.”

Not mentioning there was no particular reluctance to commit assassination under one’s own roof.

Right now they had only Taiben’s advice, predicated on Taiben’s devotedly favorable opinion of the fallen regime. This… this would be the less pleasing side of the matter. Especially as regarded the paidhi-aiji and his influence.

Tatiseigi had gotten in. The car awkwardly executed a turn, mangling a shrub in the process, and lumbered off down the road.

“I wish to try to convince this gentleman, Jago-ji. I wonder if I can do it.”

“Easier to move a mountain,” was Jago’s grim judgement. The man was notorious in the senate and elsewhere as the stiffest-necked, most hidebound lord in the west.

“We shall get the truth from this lord at least,” he said. “And if it should be a hard truth, so much the better for my pursuing it here, under the dowager’s auspices. I doubt he will poison me in her company.”

“One believes she would take strong offense,” Jago said, not at her happiest. “One hopes this is the case, Bren-ji.”

“Be easy, nadi, no matter what he says to me. I shall be glad to hear anything the lord wants to say to me, no matter how insulting, no matter how wrong. How else shall I understand what people think?”

“Indeed,” Jago muttered, not happy with the notion. “The same with his staff, nandi. We shall learn what we can, and politely tolerate what we would never tolerate. Shall we tell others of our Guild, if they ask, the things we have seen, the reasons for our actions?”

It was worth not a moment of consideration. “Yes,” he said. It was what they had to do, ultimately, and the Guild on Tatiseigi’s staff would ask those who had dealt with them. The Guild in Shejidan would need to know, above all else, and they would gather information on a situation—they would constantly gather information, and it needed to be consistent at every level.

They followed the car, no more rapidly than they had formerly ridden, and over the second hill the house itself came into view, lights gleaming through the rain.

House: fortress, rather, not quite in the sense that Malguri was a fortress, of a much older origin, but the Atageini stronghold, Tirnamardi, was a white limestone sprawl of wings and towers, some of which might have snipers at the windows, in such anxious times. The building dated from the age of gunpowder, and even had a cannon or two about the premises, which, he had heard, still fired on festive occasions, and once in the last thirty years, in a territorial dispute with Taiben, making a point, if doing harm only to a tree or two.

The old lord, disdaining modernity, had probably laid in a supply of cannonballs for the current crisis.

The place showed yellow lights from ornate windows, lights that cast rectangles on formally pruned shrubbery and, yes, a cobblestone approach, which the mechieti intensely disliked under their pads. They protested, and Cajeiri’s tended off toward the topiary hedge, intending to cross onto the clipped lawn. Jegari and Antaro rode between, and forestalled it quite deftly.

The car pulled up ahead of them. The great double doors of the house opened wide, and servants poured out onto the steps carrying electric lanterns, no floodlights installed, nothing to scar that historic facade. Gas lights had been the rule here until ten years ago, and the lord had, ever so reluctantly, modernized, only because the gas pipes had gotten too old to be safe, and electrification had been, the deciding point, cheaper to install than new gas pipes.

The lilies of the Atageini ran along the carved stone frame of the doorway atop those steps, tall, leafy stems in bas relief and graceful nodding blooms at the corners, fully defined. Lilies figured at intervals across the facade, and were—he had not noticed it—emblazoned on the black door of the car from which Tatiseigi emerged… parsimonious on technology, profligate with artists, so the reputation of the house was.

Damiri’s ancestral home. But there was no news of her, the old man had said. Has been, but not. Like a will of the wisp, Tabini’s progress through the countryside.

Servants hurried to take charge of the mechieti, who had generally formed predatory intentions against the lush, low topiary hedge. After one mistake, the servants singled out the leader as, not Ilisidi’s, but Cenedi’s. Once they had that increasingly cantankerous mechieti adequately under control from the ground, it was time for all the riders to secure the reins and get down.

Bren’s mechieti had its own ambitions toward the nearby hedge. He whacked it hard with his quirt. His blow might have been a stray breeze, the tug at the rein a mere nuisance. Its mind was set; it was dark, it was thundering and raining, the mechieti knew they were stopping and there should be food in the offing. And with the servants starting to lead the herd off, if he did not get down before they led the leader away, he would be swept ignominiously away, unable to get down before they stopped at the stables, which was not the entry to Lord Tatiseigi’s house he wanted. He slipped his leg across the bow of the serpentine neck, grasped the saddle for safety, and slid down the towering side, holding onto the leathers as he went.

He at least kept his footing on the wet cobbles. Annoyed, his mechieti swung its head back toward him with a dangerous pass of those formidable lower-jaw tusks, then, seeing the herd moving, ignored him for a stolen mouthful of carefully-pruned hedge on the way. He defended the foliage with a whack of the quirt, risking his life and swatting it twice. It moved on.

Jago came hurrying back belatedly to rescue him from the responsibility, the house servants trying to shy other mechieti off the hedges and only adding to the chaos. But the herd leader was clearly being quirted off into the dark, now. Bren got out of the path of two others, forced his legs to bear him, and felt Jago’s hand on his arm, firm and steady.

Thunder echoed off the walls.

“Dry lodgings,” Bren said breathlessly, attempting good cheer, but, God, he was done in. When he asked his limbs to walk, his knees and ankles were entirely unreliable under him. Too much sitting. Too much space travel. And earth’s gravity, reminding him what he did weigh.

Ahead of them, Tatiseigi had gone up the lily-bordered steps with Ilisidi, into the warm electric lamplight inside. Staff had followed. So had Cajeiri, and his two. He climbed, Banichi and the rest of his staff ahead of him, Jago steering him, where no one would notice.

They were, thank God, shallow steps. He reached the top, followed the dowager and her bodyguard, and the three youngsters into a lighted foyer, so warm it stole his breath. The walls had a lily fresco that jogged a dazed memory hard—they were exactly, he realized, like the lilies of the Atageini in their apartment in the Bu-javid. Lilies were prominent everywhere, in bronze on a cabinet, worked into the sconces, rendered in marble around the border of the floor. A visitor was to be aware at every instant under what roof he had come, and know how rich, how powerful this ancient clan was.

Inside, under the many-shadowed lights of the chandelier, there were the necessary greetings, Ilisidi to their host, the formal presentation of her great-grandson—and a scowl on Tatiseigi’s face as he looked over the two young people attending the heir, young people not, evidently to his taste.

“Taibeni,” he said.

“In man’chi to the young lord, nandi,” Ilisidi said sharply—if she and Tatiseigi had had fur, it would have bristled. “And under my protection.”

“They will stay with the young lord,” Tatiseigi said, “and only under those conditions, is it clear, nephew?”

“Yes, great-uncle.”

None of them were fit for polite company, except the two Taibeni, who were at least clean. As for the rest of them, no amount of small fussing could order their clothing into anything like good grace. They, and their baggage, were dripping unto the marble. There were the traces of the dirty, oily truck, fishy ice, of slobbering mechieti, sweat, stove soot, forest leaves, and God knew what else, all tracked into this immaculate hall, along with mud from the rain. But Tatiseigi’s mood had been, for him, warm, even cordial—until he spotted the two Taibeni. Encouraging, Bren said to himself, and noted that there was, unlike their bodyguards’ martial look in this hall, no sign of weapons among the staff, some of which were uniformed Guild. House servants had arrived, too, looking at them from the inside stairs, sizing up the job in some dismay, one might imagine, though nothing showed on their faces.

“We shall accept responsibility for these young people,” Ilisidi said. “But we stand in need of baths. Baths, Tati-ji. Even before brandy. Before supper. One does hope there will be supper.”

“By all means.” Appearing a little mollified, Tatiseigi made a movement of his hand. A servant ran up the marble stairs at high speed. There would be hot water only if the boilers were up. In places of this age, predating the human presence on the planet, boilers were the standard, and they did not operate at all hours. One would assume that if there was hot water, it would go first to the dowager.

Maids among the servants made deep bows, ready to escort the dowager and, odd woman in their party, Jago, upstairs.

“Young gentleman,” Tatiseigi said to Cajeiri, “you will use my own bath.” A signal honor, to a close kinsman, and with a slight disgust: “With your Taibeni. The rest of you, there is a bath backstairs.”

That, in Bren’s ears, certainly said where he belonged, in the mudroom, the bath the house would use coming in from the hunt. And Jago, who had matter-of-factly started to join the dowager in retreat, did not. She came back to him, and with Banichi, Tano, and Algini, formed part of a very unkempt and undigestible lump in the center of the immaculate foyer.

Tatiseigi scowled, and Bren gave a polite, measured bow—his staff knew. His staff understood it was not a case of saying the hell with it and taking the insult and the bath, which might or might not have hot water. He had to stand his ground or lose, here in the hall.

Jago, however, was not the only one of the women to stop. The dowager fixed the old reprobate with a chill glance.

“Ah,” Tatiseigi said, as if he were the most forgetful old man in the world. “Yes. The paidhi.”

“The Lord of the Heavens, Tati-ji, has prevented a swarm of foreigners from the far heavens descending on us in fully justified rage, a situation which we shall discuss in far greater detail over brandy. He has urgent business in the capital. But he has stopped here to pay you particular courtesy.”

Lord Tatiseigi turned a glance in his direction, a very prickly sort of glance, and it was time to follow the dowager’s statement in his own hall with a blithe and extremely courteous deference.

“With great appreciation, nandi,” Bren said, “for the good will of your lordship, under threat from the Kadigidi, which I am certain you disdain. One is particularly sensible that certain persons would hold the paidhi’s presence here as a statement of defiance, and certainly you run a risk, to open your doors to me. But I have every confidence the lord of the Atageini sets his own policy.”

Tatiseigi’s nostrils flared. A deep breath, a calculation in old, canny eyes. I know your infernal tricks, those eyes informed him. I know your flattery. My behavior will be my own, too.

But the respect was at least some face-saving to a lord who had, doubtless before his staff frequently, and loudly, cursed the paidhi and his human influence for years. Tatiseigi was so incredibly conservative and famously kabiu that the Kadigidi and the rebels in Shejidan themselves would hesitate to move against this house, a pillar of atevi culture, a bulwark against the very changes the rebellion publicly decried and wished to undo.

“The paidhi,” Tatiseigi said. “The white rooms, nand’ paidhi. Appropriate, one may say. There is a bath.”

White being the paidhi’s color. The neutral. The houseless. The impartial interpreter and advisor.

Bren bowed, slightly more deeply than courtesy dictated. The old man’s bitter insult was strangely comforting. Tatiseigi was angry with him. Tatiseigi had never been pleased with him, not from the beginning. And he argued, and made the dowager make a personal intervention for his welcome here… politics, politics. And a certain level of forthright detestation of him and the Taibeni. Whatever the strength of that old bond between Tatiseigi and the dowager, it still held; humans were still despised in this household, and on that frank detestation his safety seemed more likely. Treachery did not wear such evident resentment.

A manservant turned up to direct them up the stairs and deal with details, and Banichi and Tano and Algini went with him up the stairs, Jago going ahead of them to resume company with the dowager and the maidservant. Cajeiri and his young friends walked behind the dowager, accompanied by another young man, and with them, far in the lead, a old man who might be one of Tatiseigi’s bodyguard, but not wearing Guild leather, or carrying evident weapons.

Not the most cordial welcome, as it had evolved, but the room was lordly and the bath was glorious, fit for ten atevi at once. The manservant turned certain taps and went elsewhere to open up other lines in the antiquated system. Soon the pipe gurgled, then gave forth an explosion of air, then an abundant flow of cold, then warm, but never quite hot water gushing in with considerable force, hot water either piped in from another boiler or stolen from the distant heating system, or put at a secondary priority to the dowager’s and Cajeiri’s baths, as some of these older houses could arrange. Whatever the water-source, it was warm, it was clean, there was soap, and the flow from the two gold-plated faucets was capable of filling such a huge bath in short order.

Within the time it took them to shake the worst of the dirt off onto the tiles, it had become a very deep bath, sufficient for a human to float and for all the gentlemen of his staff to get in at once, no formalities, no objections, no precedences here.

He was ineffably glad to be rid of the clothes he had worn since the hotel, garments which he surrendered to the servants with apology. Bruises showed in amazing number on his pale skin, polka dots from head to foot. It took a truly bad bruise to show on his atevi companions, but there were a few that did, not to mention small cuts and scrapes.

He scrubbed the dirt he could see, slipped off the tile seat that ran the circumference of the tub, and ducked his head completely underwater, surfaced in bliss and used the provided soap to work up a thick lather. His hair and body felt as if he had picked up passengers. If there were, he cast them adrift. A good deal of scrubbing finally got the lingering smell of fish off his hands… he swore he’d imagined it, since the train, but now he was absolutely convinced it was gone from him and from his companions, replaced by the strong herbal scent of old-fashioned handmade soap. He scrubbed days of dirt from under his nails, and ducked under to rinse, hair streaming about his shoulders, until lack of air made him surface.

“Good,” Banichi said. “You have not drowned.”

“Clean,” he said with a sigh. Banichi at the moment was white-haired and spotted with lather, and bent under the water to rinse, sending islands of froth scudding on the waves Tano and Algini raised.

There was no deep conversation, none, what with the lord’s sharp-eared servants popping into and out of the room, carrying this, bringing that, soap, towels, lotions, every excuse and a hundred trips into the suite. But they needed no conversation. Exhaustion ruled. His staff had been as long out of the saddle as he had in their long voyage, they were surely as sore as he was, and, given their profession, they’d been at a level of tension and alertness he could only imagine for the last number of days. That alertness was still not quite abated, the quick reaction, the dart of attention to a suspicious noise in the bedroom. It was notable that, in Tatiseigi’s oh, so proper house, his staff hadn’t allowed the house servants to come near their weapons or their personal baggage, which sat defiantly, not in the master bedroom, but piled in the corner of the bath with them, in a dry spot on the tiles, tides from the filled tub occasionally washing near it, despite repeated indignant assurances from the staff that the baggage would be perfectly safe and untouched in the bedroom.

Seeing where they had disposed their critical items, Bren had put his gun there, too, with its ammunition, with his computer, with his personal bag. So there everything sat, sacrosanct, if in danger of water, still muddy, but with that in their control, they knew nothing could be added or subtracted. They felt ever so much safer, collectively.

The laundry and cleaning staff, meanwhile, had a major job on their hands, if they meant to restore ravaged clothes, scratched and rain-spattered leather, lace that had long since lost its starch and its whiteness. He had a change of clothes, but of coats he had only one, a formal one, and his staff owned only the coats they wore, which were in need of treatment they habitually attended to themselves. God knew what he would do if they had to ride with another load of frozen fish, or where he was going to get another pair of trousers his size—not to mention the boots, of which he had only the one pair, and those were in the hands of the servants. He had to muster something sufficiently respectable for this house, if they had to pay the courtesies and join Ilisidi downstairs, and oh, he dreaded that.

He shut his eyes. A shadow bent over him. A servant offered him a cordial glass on a tray.

He cast a brief, questioning look across the tub to Banichi, who blinked placidly, a signal Banichi judged it should be all right. He took it, then, but asked what it was. “Gija, nandi,” the servant said.

Safe. No alkaloids. He nodded and sipped the fruit-tasting item, which had a considerable alcohol content.

This staff had never in their lives had to wonder whether there was an alkaloid in certain foodstuffs, since it provided only a nice tang for them. They might make such a mistake in utter innocence. It became his own concern, to eat and drink only things he could identify and keep to simple foods, if his own cook had not prepared the meal—and Bindanda was up on the station, sleeping peacefully in his own bed at this hour, one hoped.

He sipped the drink, arms on the tiled rim, and felt the slow fire spread down his throat, into his stomach, through his veins. The atevi notion of a small drink was a bit excessive for a human and he left a percentage in the glass, when he abandoned it on the edge.

God, he didn’t want to move again. He didn’t know how long the painkiller would hold out. He had no blisters, at least. He’d wondered, this last few hours.

“Do you intend to go down to dinner, nandi?” Banichi asked him.

“I heard no invitation,” he said. And it was a question, now that he considered it, whether to let Ilisidi work her charm solo—she had it in abundance if she wished to use it—on her old flame, Tatiseigi. But food—food was one thing this house could provide them.

“One can easily plead indisposition,” Banichi said. “Your staff is certainly ready to plead indisposition.”

This from a man who could still lift him with one hand and fight his way out of the house unaided. But it was also the justified complaint of a staff who’d run long and hard. And a reminder that he, like the rest of them, might not be at his sharpest, going into an encounter where sharp wits would be everything.

“Nadi,” he said to the seniormost servant, who had drifted into the bath to retrieve the glass, “one has the suspicion that we would intrude on the reunion of old association in the lower hall. One hesitates to place greater burdens on an already accommodating host, and we are, when all else is said, exhausted. Might we impose on the generosity of our host to request a small, private dinner here in our rooms, for me and my staff?”

“Certainly, nand’ paidhi. One is warned the paidhi has special requirements.”

“My staff will certainly appreciate the full range of offerings of the season,” he said, “with profound thanks and compliments to the chef, for whatever courtesy he may extend to such an uninvited arrival, and one is certainly appreciative if he will consider my not inconsiderable difficulties of diet. One only asks modest accommodation, simple bread without seasonings for me, a simply grilled and salted meat of the season—such would be extraordinarily appreciated, nadi. A bottle of common brandy, nothing at all extraordinary. We shall all stand in debt of your lord. And there may be one other person sharing this meal, if she should come back.”

A bow from the servant. He had kept his requests very limited, his instruction clear and easily handled, consideration for a chef already discommoded by an unexpected arrival—even Bindanda had his limits of endurance, and a lordly request from a human guest for particular favors and special cooking instructions would not meet with favor under this roof, he was quite sure.

He wished the servant staff, at least, to report the house guests as well-behaved.

There were robes provided—his reached the floor, and had to have the sleeves rolled up threefold, so that he looked like a child playing dress-up. His staff helped him with the sleeves, laughing the while, then wiped down their muddy baggage, using a pile of soft white towels, wiped down their coats, as well, and broke out the small store of leather treatment they carried in their gear, a comfortingly domestic task, the air filled with the sharp, oily smell of the bottle. Servants only gingerly offered to assist and provide cleaning cloths—the Guild rarely permitted another staff to touch their personal gear, which had an amazing array of small pockets and reinforced seams, not to mention outright weaponry and wires. Damp hair went up into queues, a stubbled human face benefited by a shave and lotion, and over all, they presented a more civilized appearance by the time dinner arrived, borne by a procession of servants.

And the offering evidenced a chef in decent temper, or one severely instructed to maintain the dignity of the house. His requested meat of the season turned out to be a massive grilled fish, perfectly prepared, with a domed loaf of crusty hot bread, in a warm clay container to conserve the heat, with a very nice southern fruit wine in a sealed and sweating bottle. The meal for Banichi, Tano, and Algini was a savory game roast with gravy, with spiced vegetables, fresh greens of the season, and a lovely iced fruit dessert, which happily they all could share. Not to mention a very nice bottle of brandy, as if the great lord would possess anything less.

“I had thought Jago would join us by now, nadi,” he said to Banichi.

“She likely will attend the dowager to dinner,” Banichi said. “She will attempt to manage it, Cenedi permitting.”

Jago would stand formal guard so their separate staff might have a report of the doings down there, Bren thought. A very good idea. The pocket coms were useless except as walkie-talkies, in a place where there was no supporting network. They were obliged to sit ignorant, this rainy evening, of all that was happening elsewhere. The world which had been so tightly knit around them, themselves aware of every tic and twitch on any deck, around the clock, in every circumstance, was far away, floating in space and out of reach. Here, separated for an hour from Jago and the dowager, their world began to develop dark pockets of delayed or no information.

But it was also a kabiu house, and, on the side of Jago’s continued attendance on the dowager, it was not particularly graceful for Jago to show up in their male society to sleep—he realized that the moment he thought of it. The old lord would not have male-female teams on his staff. That Jago slept with a human—the old lord would have a conniption, a whole litter of them, if what was likely common gossip in the capital turned out to be reality under his roof.

Prickly old man, devotedly maintaining a life in the previous century, a dragging anchor on change in the aishidi’tat—but not, evidently, following the Kadigidi, who only put on a show of old-fashioned attitudes. It was not so much that Tatiseigi had ever been deeply loyal to Tabini. It was that this old man would insist, if there was no Tabini, he, not his upstart neighbors the Kadigidi, had the right to govern the mainland, at least the central part of it, where people of his own opinion lived. It was centuries-old ambition, he had the picture quite clear—ancient ambition, and a grand-nephew who, in his day, might bring absolute power to the Atageini bloodline.

One could only hope Cajeiri did not regale his uncle at supper, downstairs tonight, with his opinions on humans and racing-cars.

But that was trouble Ilisidi would be there to handle—quite deftly, giving up nothing, the paidhi was sure.

And a delicate, wonderful fish, with bread dipped in salted oil, the light, iced wine, the like of which he had not tasted literally in years—all these things combined to persuade the paidhi that it was a very, very good thing he had stayed in his room. He was by no means qualified for diplomacy, tonight. If he had sat at the table downstairs he might have fallen asleep in the soup course, and a drink of wine would have completely finished him. As it was, he only tasted the wonderful dessert, and apologetically took to his bed, face down. Banichi, Tano, and Algini were, except for the dessert, of the same mind, and Tano and Algini bedded down together in the adjacent bedroom, while Banichi was about to take the guard post aside from the small foyer, where a cot could be let down.

“Share the bed,” he said to Banichi. “I rattle around in it anyway, Banichi-ji.” It was a very large mattress, even by atevi standards, and he probably could have fitted Tano and Algini in for good measure, if they had not already settled.

The fact was, it made him feel safe. Safe, and watched over, when the circumstances of the house were not as safe as they could wish. His head was reeling from the wine and the half glass of brandy. He wasn’t up to conversation, or questions, and too stupid to judge reassurances. It was enough to know that Banichi was there, and he wished Jago were, too. Having her out of his sight and elsewhere in this place made him marginally anxious, but if trouble was to come tonight, he relied on Jago to make it heard from one end of the house to the other, and on Banichi and the rest to handle it, no matter the odds.

“I hope we have clothes tomorrow,” he murmured.

The bed shook to Banichi’s silent, short laugh. “One would expect they will have attended the laundry, Bren-ji. We have told the staff you would perhaps attend breakfast. With enough bleach, staff may even be able to restore the lace.”

“Very good,” he murmured. “Ever so good, Banichi-ji.” And he went straight to sleep.

There were, indeed, clothes in the morning. The staff had even darned a small rip and drawn in the pulled threads where thorns and brush had snagged his coat. The shirt was bleached white, the modest lace was immaculately starched, his boots were polished, and even the white ribbon for his queue was washed and pressed despite its frays and snags, not to mention there were clean stockings and linen. Bren dressed himself as far as the shirt, but getting the hair braided properly and ribboned was a difficult operation even if he were less stiff.

“Here,” Tano said. “Let me do it, nandi.”

“Bren,” he said decisively. “One wishes the staff would always call me more familiarly, in private, Tano-ji, if it would not distress you.”

“It would by no means distress us,” Tano said. And quick, deft plaiting secured the braid, with its ribbon. With a pat on his shoulder, Tano pronounced him fit for public appearance.

Staff’s uniforms were fit, everything done to perfection, everyone feeling very much better, it was certain, after a night’s sleep and clean clothing. Even the stiffness was somewhat abated this morning—it still warranted sitting a little gingerly, but not so much as before.

A servant appeared, with a formal message scroll, an invitation to breakfast on the terrace.

“I have no means to reply in kind,” Bren answered the servant, “but advise your lord I shall be there, and I thank him for his gracious invitation.”

Message cylinder. One small item he had neglected to pack. He’d left it—the mind jolted between worlds—in the bowl on the table in his quarters aboard Phoenix. Staff had packed it. It must be in his apartment on station. He was very loath to lose it.

And if he was taking up brain cells mourning lost personal items, he knew he was dodging thinking about what he was going to do downstairs. Nervous about the meeting? Oh, not a little. He had had no report yet from Jago. He caught himself pacing while Banichi restored a number of arcane items to his jacket’s inner pockets and then to the hollow seam of his right boot.

Odd, he thought, as the small pile of strange objects diminished. As long as they’d been together, he’d never seen the whole array. It was curious, some of the pieces, though the uses for almost invisible wire were disturbing to think of.

A rap at the door. Jago’s signal. Thank God. Algini let her in, and she had fared as well, clean and polished, as immaculate as she might walk the halls of the Bu-javid.

“Nandi.” A bow. “Nadiin.”

“How did it go, Jago-ji?”

A slight glance at the ceiling, warning they might be overheard, far from surprising in a modern great house, and not, reasonably, in this one. “The conference last night was interesting,” Jago said, her eyes sparkling. “Lord Tatiseigi, nadiin-ji, firmly believes the aiji is alive.”

Indeed astonishing that Tatiseigi should say so, when he had everything to gain by hiding that belief—if he entertained personal ambitions of supplanting Tabini with a young and pliant Cajeiri. Maybe the old reprobate was in fact on the up and up. Maybe Ilisidi had gotten good behavior out of him.

Maybe there were motives he hadn’t thought of.

Damn, it was altogether what he’d tried to avoid doing, immersing himself in possibilities before listening to what might be going on at the breakfast table.

“What did the dowager say to that supposition, Jago-ji?”

“That she would not tell Cajeiri until there is something certain.”

“Cajeiri did not attend last night?”

“No. He dined in, with his staff, and Nawari.”

He approved of Ilisidi’s caution. Atevi or human, the boy had feelings for his father and mother, and sending them soaring and then crashing on every tidbit of news was not good, not at all good for an adult, let alone an eight-year-old.

“Does our host say where Tabini-aiji is?” Banichi asked.

Jago put her hands in her jacket pockets, with another cautionary glance at the ceiling. “Nand’ Tatiseigi maintains that the aiji sent Mercheson-paidhi ahead of him to Mogari-nai. He followed her route as far as the coast, then when it was attacked, returned to Taiben, then here.”

Exactly as the Taibeni had said—except the detail about Tabini coming back to Tirnamardi.

“He and Damiri-daja stayed here three days, with certain staff, and then two staffers left, and all the rest of them left shortly after. There has been no word since. The aiji did not say where he was going, nadiin.”

“One would not expect it,” Banichi said. “Nor should we discuss our opinions of his whereabouts under this roof.”

“Indeed,” Jago said. They were speaking for eavesdroppers’ consumption. Listening devices. Jago had confirmed it, and she might well be the one of the team carrying electronic means of knowing for sure. Tatiseigi favored antiquated lighting—but this said nothing about Guild members in the household, who, one reasonably presumed, would not use centuries-old equipment.

But this news—this news, if it was true and even if Tatiseigi only believed it to be true—this affected how they dealt with the old man, and the turns things might now take. He was keenly aware that he himself had become an issue, because of his advice to Tabini, and that it was likely a very hot issue under this roof. He personally had two choices, as he saw it—personally absorb the blame for everything Tabini had done, which left Tabini looking weak and reliant on bad advice—or vindicate himself, and thereby vindicate Tabini in the eyes of a lord who had voted against the space program, decried the shift in economy, hated modern technology, human culture, foreigners in general, and had taken a position in those regards, publicly and loudly, for years.

“Would it be possible,” he said to his staff, putting the final touches on his lace cuffs, “rather than us trying to go personally to Shejidan, for us to urge members of nand’ Tatiseigi’s staff to go for us, and notify the Guild that we are intent on reaching them—even ask them to put a hold on Guild actions until we can arrive?”

It was a legal question, on one side of the coin. It was a question of lordly opinion on the other, as to whether Tatiseigi would honestly cooperate with an effort on Tabini’s behalf—and, presumably, Damiri’s.

“It would be technically possible,” Banichi said, “legally possible. Tatiseigi certainly has standing in the question, as a relative.”

“It might save lives,” Tano said. “Through them, we might obtain a safe conduct for the paidhi. If he asked that, it might work.”

“Saving our own lives, among others,” Jago said.

“The Guild, debating its course of action,” Banichi said, “is only doing so as a subterfuge. They wish not to support Murini as legitimate, not to support Tabini-aiji either, until questions are resolved. They will debate, at all hours of session, if someone has to stand and recite poetry to continue the flow of words—as I imagine they must have read several volumes in by now. All this is a way of remaining neutral, and it will be impossible for them to dissolve the session until they can vote one way or the other, if the question has been put—they will be reasonably anxious to find some resolution. The traitors have not persuaded them to end debate, and one suspects that now the Kadigidi themselves are urgently raising their offers and making promises they would not make otherwise, ceding portions of their authority to the Guild—which the Guild seems to have been wise enough to ignore. If we convince them to send for the paidhi to testify, this would represent a break of a sort ominous for the other side. They might try to do something about it, at very, very great risk of offending the Guild.”

Bren asked, out of his own musings: “Might Tabini himself have asked them to stalemate, knowing he could not carry the vote until we came back?”

Banichi thought about that. So did all his staff. “It would certainly be a canny move,” Banichi said. “His own staff has evidently taken a heavy strike. It would have impaired his ability to take direct action. Worse, he may have suspected treachery from the inside.”

Who, possibly, would be a traitor on Tabini’s staff? Bren asked himself, and dared not ask aloud, nor did Banichi’s glance at the peripheries of the room encourage another question—not in the very house that was most suspect. If there had been treachery, he would lay odds it would never be one of the men who’d been with Tabini forever, not those Guild members born into his man’chi. No. It had to be someone who’d come into the household from outside. Staff acquisitions were rare.

Except—except most of Tabini’s own original staff were male. A lady needed female staff; Ilisidi’s preference for ‘her young men’ was the scandalous exception, since her husband’s death, since she had achieved the status of aiji-dowager, and moved in staff from Malguri, and gave not a damn for propriety.

Damiri’s staff, on the other hand, was Atageini and, proper to a lady, female. Staff from her own home, persons close to her, had come with her when she married Tabini… Bindanda, of his own staff, was one of the handful Tatiseigi had sent, and he knew it, and by now he was sure Bindanda knew he knew…

And, God, if only, he thought, if only the dish at Mogari-nai were up, and Bindanda were able to report to Tatiseigi his experiences directly—things might be much easier.

But as for spies in Tabini’s house, and ways information might have flowed, and those by whom a lethal strike might have been organized—

This house, this province, had bordered the Kadigidi since medieval times. And who knew how many and how deep the cross-connections of all sorts that had grown between Atageini and Kadigidi, over centuries?

That certainly wasn’t a topic he wanted to raise where they might be overheard.

It could mean Tatiseigi himself was in danger, a life the Kadigidi could take at any time, a life preserved from assassination in the specific hope he would serve as a magnet for intrigue, and maybe in the hope he might be a lure to draw Tabini in. Their coming here, their welcome, could tilt a delicate balance.

Tatiseigi had not apparently suffered any Kadigidi attack here, even when Tabini had been here—if he had, it would surely have made conversation last night, in Jago’s hearing. Which could also mean that the conspirators had not been able to get a spy back into this house from Shejidan in time to advise them of Tabini’s presence here, before he was gone again.

Or—it could mean that the initial coup that took Tabini from power had Atageini fingerprints somewhere around the edges of it, and things were not so safe here as they seemed. He could not believe that Tatiseigi would have ceded political control to an upstart like Murini. He could not believe Lady Damiri herself would ever have betrayed Tabini—in the machimi, betrayal from a previously well-disposed spouse was absolutely classic, but she had no motive, and her man’chi to her great-uncle had always been more a case of exasperated tolerance—her parents were dead, her great-uncle was her clan head, and she had been his ward, which had put her in constant contention with the old man as she reached her majority—and her own more modern opinions.

Besides, Damiri being the mother of the heir, and factually outstripping her uncle in power in the nation at large, she had no motive to strike at the very power she shared with Tabini…

No motive, that was, unless she had taken violent offense at Tabini shipping their child out on a starship, to be thoroughly taught and indoctrinated by his conservative great-grandmother Ilisidi on the way.

Had Tabini even consulted her in that move? He would have believed Tabini would not act without her, on that matter, but—

Tatiseigi, on the other hand—dismissing treachery originating from Cajeiri’s mother—Tatiseigi had a massive array of unsatisfied ambitions, and a family history of desire for rule. His surest path to power logically involved setting Cajeiri in power in Shejidan, and that was already the appointed succession, if Tabini only stayed in power, and it was nowhere in the picture if Murini established his own line. Tatiseigi’s other concerns must involve keeping Damiri from supplanting him inside the clan—which she had never pressed to do, likely having no wish to be encumbered by clan affairs and a populace which shared its lord’s attitudes toward technology.

As to whether Tabini’s sending the boy off to space would have particularly alienated Tatiseigi, one had to consider that Tatiseigi had far rather see the boy under Ilisidi’s conservative tutelage than in Tabini’s, Tabini-aiji notoriously promoting one Bren Cameron to extravagant office, and accepting everything modern, with sudden extra-terrestrial ambitions.

But… but… but. Tatiseigi had hosted Tabini here since the overthrow, and hadn’t killed him, or Damiri.

Which circled back to Damiri’s reasons.

Atevi didn’t marry for life, not often; but those two had always seemed so apt, so close and permanent a pair—and to have relinquished their son for a particularly formative couple of years…

Never mind that the paidhi, who was now persona non grata most everywhere that had once approved him, if he read the signs, had also had a hand in the boy’s teaching. Tatiseigi would have been happy enough believing Ilisidi was in charge of the boy—but not at all happy considering the boy was also under the paidhi’s instruction.

Damn it. His stomach was upset. He didn’t want to consider Cajeiri’s mother among the suspects, but had to, for self-preservation, because it was absolutely classic; and considering where they lodged at the moment, he didn’t want to suspect Tatiseigi of being in on it, or of lying when he said Tabini was alive.

Most likely suspect in any treason, Atageini servants: he certainly couldn’t rule out one of Damiri’s maids as the infiltrator, likely someone who was secretly Guild, and likely someone with some still more secret man’chi to the Kadigidi that had somehow deceived first Tatiseigi’s, then Tabini’s very canny staff, for years and years. That would have meant there had been a traitor on Tatiseigi’s staff even before Murini, even back before the traitor Direiso’s tenure over the Kadigidi… because assuredly nobody with a taint could get in afterward.

And if Tatiseigi had made one mistake—who knew but what the Kadigidi might have other allies under this roof at the moment? It was perfectly reasonable for the neighboring Kadigidi to try to infiltrate, and it was perfectly possible for them to have done it for centuries, all with a view to maneuvering the Atageini politically or gaining useful information at critical junctures. It went on all the time, to various degrees. It was simply the atevi way of coexisting with the neighbors and knowing what they were doing—usually not across so bitter a dividing line as Kadigidi and Atageini, but spies did get in, spies got caught, feuds sprang up and died down over time. The Atageini might be doing exactly the same thing over in Kadigidi territory. And, God, if he went on, he would be suspecting Ilisidi herself of fomenting the coup, which was utterly unlikely… nothing that would ever put Murini in power.

One could say the same, actually, about her ever putting Tatiseigi in power, when he thought of it that way.

And he, meanwhile, had to go to breakfast with the old scoundrel.

“We had better go,” he said, taking a last look in the mirror.

“We shall watch the room, Bren-ji,” Tano said.

“Should anything happen—”

Banichi cleared his throat and made several rapid handsigns. One of them, Bren knew, meant the team should go fast, probably in prearranged directions, with prearranged priorities. It was not the paidhi’s business to ask.

Tatiseigi was his problem.

So down the hall they went, down the stairs, and to the lower-level balcony, where an Atageini servant directed them to a right turn, down through a dining room. The double doors at the end of the room were open, and Ilisidi and Tatiseigi were already at breakfast out there, with suitable attendance of bodyguards lined up formally along the end of the dining room… including, one could not but notice, young Antaro, meaning that Cajeiri was at breakfast, meaning that the younger set had, just like their elders, prudently seen to room security, one of them remaining behind to keep the premises secure… and meaning that uncle Tatiseigi was probably annoyed as hell.

Not fools, the two Taibeni youngsters, Bren said to himself.

He approved, though he worried about youngsters who might think they could take action in crisis, and who might get themselves in the way of Guild action, trammeling up his bodyguard and Ilisidi’s, who did know what they were doing.

But—in the light of his thoughts of the morning—might one think that uncle Tatiseigi had reasons to think spies!

He walked out the double doors, onto a terrace under morning sun, a painted railing of—what else?—wrought-brass lilies, and a beautifully laid table, with a large bouquet of seasonal flowers, mostly mauve, with sprigs of evergreen, three in number, which said a wealth of things, if the paidhi had the skill to unravel it—he almost did, if he had had one more level of his brain to spare for wondering. Their host was there, Ilisidi, and Cajeiri, demanding instant attention.

He went to the empty chair, bowed slightly. “Apologies, nandiin, for my tardiness.” Nods. He sat down. Servants moved to offer him eggs—those, he accepted, since they were in the shell, and free of sauces. Toast was perfectly fine, and oh, so good—and steaming tea, which came most welcome of all in the bracing chill.

“My compliments to the staff and the cook,” he said, the proper courtesy, “who have done extravagantly hard work to make a visitor comfortable and safe.”

“Indeed,” Tatiseigi said. “We should hardly wish to poison a guest.”

“We favor nand’ Bren extremely,” Cajeiri said sharply, out of turn, “and if someone poisoned him we would take it very ill.”

Silent attention followed this pointed remark, not exactly what Bren would have chosen as a conversation opener.

“We thank the young gentleman,” Bren said, “but we have no complaint at all. Lord Tatiseigi’s hospitality is flawless.”

Ilisidi snorted, but made no comment.

This was not going at all well. Bren reached for toast for his eggs, wondering what he had walked into, and dared not intervene in the tension between the dowager and her former—one thought, former—lover. If this was something like a domestic dispute in progress, a stray human was by no means welcome.

“The paidhi recognizes our delicate position,” Tatiseigi said, “does he not? We have inconvenience on every border. Delicate alliances are rendered precarious by your arrival. Our very lives are at hazard, not to mention the interests of the central provinces, which we have carefully safeguarded.”

“May one assume our grandson and his consort quitted this place under their host’s invitation?”

“No such thing!” Tatiseigi banged down his spoon, and tea quivered in the cups. “Perverse woman!”

“One deems it an entirely fair question,” Ilisidi said. She trisected a hardboiled egg with surgical precision, speared a portion and popped it into her mouth. “Under the circumstances of such extreme threat as you describe, one considers even the Atageini might tremble, with southern scoundrels in the ascendant, possessed of records and resources in the capital.”

“Piffle,” Tatiseigi snorted. “You will give them another half year of unity, ’Sidi-ji. You invigorate them by your presence. If you had frittered away any more time in the heavens they would have been at each others’ throats.”

“And the whole region would collapse in bloody ruin, which would by no means be to your advantage, Tati-ji.”

“The Atageini need nothing from the outside. We never have!”

Another snort. “Nor does Malguri.” Her own holding, which had equally primitive plumbing. “But our walls are ill-prepared for war, this century. One had rather not stand siege from airplanes.”

“There would be no such siege. There would not have been, if you had stayed up in—wherever it is, up there.”

“Oh, say on! Do you think the Kadigidi will go on flattering an old fool?”

“Disagreeable woman!”

“So you say throats will be cut in the capital, once the conspirators fall out. Granted, of course, granted, and they will. But whose throats, say. And where are the knives being sharpened? The southerners are the foreigners in these central regions, here at invitation. And which of the central provinces have bedded down closest with these southern fools? And who will do the throat-cutting when complacency takes hold? The Kadigidi will cry ‘Foreigners on our land!’ and be at them in short order. Will they not, Tati-ji? And they will rouse up the central provinces, and they will lead, taking an even firmer grip than they have now, while you have no daughter of your house married into that line, do you, Tati-ji?”

“Damn your nattering! This is breakfast, no time for business! You insult my table!”

“I merely point out—”

“Oh, point out and point out, do! Do you say we are fools who never saw these matters for ourselves!”

“Absolutely not. We have come under your roof, have we not? We had every confidence that the Atageini would not be swayed by Kadigidi blandishments. These are excellent preserves, Tati-ji.”

Tatiseigi took a mouthful of eggs. “Empty flattery, and you mean not a word of it.”

“Everyone can do with a little flattery, so long as it stays close to truth. You were always too wise for your neighbors. And remain so, we believe, or we would not have come here first and foremost.”

“Not first! You sojourned with the Taibeni!”

“Taiben lies between your land and the coast, Tati-ji, and always has. We received assistance, yes. Would you expect otherwise? But we came to you, having received a report—from the Taibeni—that you held out very bravely.”

“Ha! One doubts those are the words.”

“An approximation. In these times, Taiben respects you, and respects your borders. And joins you in disapprobation of your neighbors to the east.”

“The Kadigidi are fools and troublemakers. And bed down with other fools. That whelp of Direiso’s… ”

“Murini.”

“… had the extreme effrontery to write a letter to this house, under his seal, attempting to enlist us.”

Ilisidi pursed her lips, above the rim of her cup. “Did you pitch his man onto the step, Tati-ji?”

“I was very cordial, and temporized.” Another spoonful of sauce. The paidhi ate very quietly, meanwhile, listening to all this extraordinary flow of confidences and not rattling so much as a cup. Cajeiri sat likewise quiet, those keen ears taking in everything, remarkable patience for a boy. Definitely, Bren thought, Cajeiri showed the qualities that created his father.

“So what was the gist of this impertinent letter?” Ilisidi asked.

“They wanted to use the Atageini name, can you imagine? We explained to these fools that since a daughter of this house is their quarry, we would either take command of the search and the campaign or we would tastefully abstain and make our demands clear if they should find her. For some reason they did not immediately cede the search to us, and seemed confused by our rebuke.”

Ilisidi snorted, short, dark laughter. “Wicked man.”

“This generation has no sense. Do you hear, great-grandnephew? ”

“Sir.” Cajeiri was caught with a mouthful of toast.

“Why are they fools?”

A rapid swallow. “Because the Atageini hate them, and they wrote a stupid letter, grand-uncle.”

“Not the answer, boy. They are out of touch with kabiu. Their hearts are dead. They have lost touch with the earth, with the seasons. Like humans. They practice flower-arrangement as if that was the be-all, and conceive that I would help them.”

“Nand’ Bren understands kabiu,” Cajeiri said, seizing on the casual slight, ignoring the central issue. “Much better than any Kadigidi.”

“Does he?” Tatiseigi’s pale gold eyes swung toward Bren, questioning, hostile, and Bren, wishing for invisibility, gave a little nod to the old lord. “Do you, paidhi?”

“Enough to know flower-arrangement is a manifestation of respect for the earth and the numbers of life, nandi, and that the mind and the heart surely improve with a deeper understanding of such issues.” He had no wish at all to debate the old man, or to become the centerpiece of argument, but Cajeiri had taken him for a shield… hell, for a weapon. “As, for instance, your arrangement, the three sprigs, fortunate in number, honor yourself, the dowager, your young kinsman, the evergreen lasting in all seasons.”

“Ha!” Tatiseigi said, caught out in his little grim humor. “He knows by rote. Like my great-grandnephew, who has doubtless read all the books. Where does one learn kabiu up in the ether of the heavens? Where are flowers, where are stones, where is the sun?”

“One sees the stars,” Cajeiri said firmly. “Which behave together, all connected to each other and to us.”

“Ha,” Tatiseigi said again. A wonder if Tatiseigi knew or cared that the earth went around the sun. “Stars, indeed. Can you say your seasons, youngster? Or do you even remember them?”

“We could say the seasons when we were six!” Cajeiri said, leaning forward, and using that autocratic pronoun. “And we have also seen very many stars, nandi, and have a notebook with their numbers and their motions.”

“And the numbers of the earth, young sir, and the numbers even of this room? Can you declare those?”

“The small wildflower in the arrangement, sir, is surely because of my mother, as if she were at the table, since lilies are not in season. But I see nothing here for my father. My great-grandmother, and nand’ Bren, and I are at this table for him, fortunate three, and since Bren has no representation at all, perhaps the addition of a remembrance for him would have upset the favorable numbers of our breakfast—since you are at the table, and you clearly do not count yourself for my father, sir, which would make it four, without amelioration in the bouquet, which you did not add. Am I right, mani-ma?”

The only trace of the child, that last appeal to his great-grandmother, who arched her brows and pursed her lips.

“Precocious boy!” Tatiseigi was annoyed, and would not have taken such a rebuke from an adult.

“One has noted the arrangement,” Ilisidi said, and no, the paidhi could not have read that much of it, except that lilies were out of season, and that in this kabiu household nothing out of season would appear out of a hothouse.

“Damned precocious. Is this disrespect your teaching, or the paidhi’s?”

“I told you I would not neglect the graceful arts, Tati-ji.”

“And courtesy? Where is respect of his elders?”

“I am very respectful, nandi,” Cajeiri said. “And offer regret for the patio.”

The mechieti incident, with the wet cement.

“Precocious, I say!” It was not a compliment. Profile stared at profile across the table, that Atageini jaw set hard—on both sides of the equation.

“Where are my mother and my father, nandi? If you know, we request you say.”

It was the uncle who broke the stare and looked at Ilisidi, whose face was perfectly serene.

“Have we an answer to give the child, nandi?”

“No, we have not an answer. Your grandson offered me none. Likely he failed to tell my niece, either. They kited off into the night without warning or courtesy.”

“Afoot, nandi? In a vehicle?”

“On mechieti, as they came.”

“Ha.” Ilisidi nodded sagely.

Mechieti meant an overland route, off the roads, which made them hard to track by ordinary means.

Aircraft, on the other hand…

“For all I know,” Tatiseigi said, “they crossed the corner of Kadigidi land and headed for the high hills.”

Not impossible. But dangerous. Deadly dangerous.

“Excuse a question, nandi.” Bren felt he needed to ask. “Have there been planes up?”

“Not over Atageini land, we assure you! Noisy contraptions. Not over our land.”

So they could not track Tabini by that means, not close at hand, and that might have let him get into the hills—or even circle back into Taiben. He might have been there, and the people of Taiben would not have betrayed his presence, not until he had given personal consent, which their hasty passage might not have allowed.

It might be wise for Ilisidi and Cajeiri to set up here and let Tabini come to them, if he could—if they could keep the peace with Uncle Tatiseigi in the meanwhile. But there might be lives already at risk on the coast. A counter-revolution would be a delicate thing, easily crushed, unless something busied the Kadigidi very quickly, and stirred up maximum trouble.

The paidhi, in that regard, had a job to do. He had to overcome the Kadigidi arguments, had to prove that Tabini was not wrong to have relied on his advice. And if he could not convince this old man, who had accepted him under his roof, he had no chance at all in places where he might be less favorably regarded.

“One wishes cautiously to advance a plan of action, nandiin.” Bren’s throat constricted unexpectedly, and his hands sweated. “I feel I should not impose my presence here overlong. That I should go to the capital, to the Guild, to present the case for our mission, to say what we have found, to justify my advice to the aiji, which it seems I must do.”

“Suicide,” Ilisidi said sharply.

“Is there a justification for bad advice?” Tatiseigi retorted. “Is there any justification for this overthrow of kabiu, this intrusion of belching machines and smoke into our skies? Is there any justification for this general corruption of our traditions, setting our young people grasping after human toys, is there any justification for television and rushing across the country in an afternoon, scaring the game and ruining perfectly good land with racketing airports?”

There it was in a nutshell. Justifiable, considering all that atevi had already let slip, precariously close to forgetting certain imperatives. For a moment he saw no argument on his side at all. What had been done in the heavens, humans could have done.

He could have done. If he ever could have gotten into space without atevi industry behind him, and could not have had that without Tabini’s strong backing, and that had been the beginning of all the changes, and the present trouble.

There was a chain of justification. Difficult as it was, the reasons were unavoidable, if egocentric—because there was no one but a person skilled in cross-species logic who could have seen the problem.

And it had taken a seven-year-old atevi prince to make the kyo believe their intentions.

“With the aiji-dowager’s leave,” he began, “I do wish to justify it, sir, and beg your indulgence to begin under this roof.”

“No,” Ilisidi said sharply. “You will never convince him. He is set against it. He is convinced I have lost my senses and soared off to the heavens with my great-grandson, intending to corrupt him and turn him human.”

“Well?” Tatiseigi asked, with a jut of that Atageini jaw. “And you bring him back here with two ragamuffins from Taiben, no less—Taiben! No doubt they have poached in our woods, and now eye the household silver.”

“I am Ragi,” Cajeiri’s higher voice said, “and you are my great-great-uncle, and great-grandmother is Malguri! And you should not speak badly of my father and my mother!”

There was a small, shocked silence.

“The world is changing,” Ilisidi said. “Living things do change, Tati-ji. Even the hills change. Kabiu itself moves slowly, but it does move, as the very earth moves. Baji-naji. There is always room to flex, or a thing breaks, Tati-ji.”

Around the flank and uncomfortably up from behind. Tatiseigi looked disquieted, and very much out of sorts.

“Look at this boy,” Ilisidi said, “half Atageini, and tell me there is no connection. He has your jaw, Tati-ji.”

“Clearly!”

Ilisidi took up her napkin. “We shall discuss this without the boy.”

“To be sure.” Tatiseigi was still irate, but the thunder and the fury sank, a temporary lull, like a pause in a storm that had only had its initial run. “To be sure. Take the paidhi with you.”

Tatiseigi laid aside his own napkin. Breakfast was over. There were courtesies, bows, as they rose. Bren had the notion he had just been in a war, and wished only to clear the area without complete disaster.

“Nand’ Bren,” Cajeiri said, and fixed him with an eye-level stare. That was all he said, just an acknowledgement of his presence, and the boy’s disquiet, perhaps, at certain transactions.

“Nandi,” he said, and let everyone including Tatiseigi precede him off the balcony, back into the hall. He was cold, chilled through. He was always cold at these open-air breakfasts. He walked out to collect his bodyguard and retraced his steps with them through the halls, with every confidence that they had heard everything that passed out there… staff on the next floor might have heard a good part of it.

Upstairs, then, and behind their own doors, where Tano and Algini had kept things safe and secure.

“It did not go well, nadiin-ji,” he said, “but it was not disastrous. No one was assassinated.”

Banichi thought it funny. He was less sure. His efforts to persuade Tatiseigi had gotten him nowhere, Ilisidi had some agenda of her own, or Tatiseigi had, and the boy, defending him, had annoyed the old man… all of which was predictable, now that he thought about it. He should not be glum about the situation—raw fear might be appropriate, but glumness was hardly warranted, when his companions had behaved exactly as they might be expected to behave.

Which argued, perhaps, that going into a critical debate with Cajeiri at hand was not the best choice.

Wind blew through open windows, wind stirring the gauzy inner draperies, and carrying all the scents of the earth.

He had had a night’s sleep, even a decent night’s sleep. But when he tried to think about what to say to Lord Tatiseigi, if he could get a quiet meeting, it completely refused to take shape in his brain, as if that was not what he ought to be thinking about, as if the whole world was pulling at his sleeve, wanting his attention, refusing to deal logically, or at least, refusing to deal in human logic. He wanted to throw himself into bed, pull the covers up around his ears and lie there getting warm and digesting a too-large breakfast—desire for the tastes had led him to overindulge, and he had eaten to appear uninvolved while the barbs flew—but the desire for sleep was not a desire for sleep. He knew himself, that the instant his head hit the pillows he would start processing the things he had heard, sifting them for every nuance, regretting things not said, and things said. It was his job to parse such things: something in what the dowager and Tatiseigi had said, or something he had picked up elsewhere this morning or last night, had begun to make a nest in his subconscious. If he went to bed, he would have to undress, to save the clothes; if he delayed to undress, he might lose the thought. And right now the safest place for him was a large, well-padded chair in the sitting area, and not letting those subconscious thoughts surface and distract him from what he, dammit, needed to think about. It could be as foreign to the problem as a remembrance of something Barb had said. He began to wonder if it was something he had eaten or drunk, the somnolence was so urgent, so absolutely pressing.

He sat, finding warmth in the well-padded chair, attempted to distract himself with a view of the land and sky outside, all veiled in blowing gauze, but he kept seeing the metal and plastics of the ship. He kept thinking of Jase, who had a food-short population on his hands, and tanks to get into operation, and who would have loved half of the breakfast he had just had. Of Barb. Of Toby, at the wheel of his boat. Crack of sails in a stiff breeze.

Shuttle runway. Wheels down.

He had done precious little good down there, except to serve as a lightning rod for Tatiseigi’s irritations. Or possibly to provoke them. He had no idea whether Tatiseigi had included him in the breakfast of his own volition, or whether Ilisidi had insisted on it to annoy the old man.

Or to have a lightning-rod handy, to prevent topics being raised which she had no wish to discuss at the moment.

Should he send a message to the old man, request an audience independent of Ilisidi? He had not the least idea what to do now. He heard his staff talking quietly in the bedroom. He supposed that was a debrief and a strategy session. He ought to participate. He ought to have a brilliant idea what to do from here, and whether he ought to stay here, and urge the dowager to stay here, where there was at least reasonable protection—or whether he should go to Shejidan and present the untried arguments before Banichi’s Guild.

He knew what he had rather not do—which was to go to Shejidan. But it was fear that held that opinion. Logic might dictate otherwise, if he could summon the will to think straight.

Too much breakfast, too much comfort here.

He had to talk to his staff, once they’d had a chance to talk to everyone else, once Ilisidi had a chance, canny as she was, to figure what Tatiseigi knew or didn’t know. He was dim-brained because he had an adrenaline charge shoving his brain into all-out effort, he had a critical lack of information, and every instinct was telling him not to press Tatiseigi too hard, that there was a current flowing between Tatiseigi and Ilisidi that was critical, that he should not interrupt.

Waiting. Waiting was the very devil.

Chapter 10

He must have dozed, sitting there in the armchair, tucked up against the slight cool breeze from the open window. He came awake with the passage of a shadow between him and the light, and saw Banichi standing between him and the windows. Jago was with him. Tano and Algini were behind them.

“Nadiin-ji?” He sorted his wits for relevant recent information and remembered breakfast, and a post-breakfast conference in progress among his staff.

“We have a plan, Bren-ji.”

Wonderful. A plan. He so much wanted a plan. He had failed to come up with one, and he was sure Banichi’s was going to involve his staff doing something that would risk their lives.

He mustered the wit and fortitude to say no to those gathered, earnest faces.

“Sit down, please, nadiin.” He wanted a quiet conference, one in which they did not cut out his sunlight, or loom over him with superior force. “One hopes it by no means involves your going to Shejidan without me.”

Not a twitch. “No, Bren-ji.” From Banichi. “It involves Lord Tatiseigi’s men going there.”

“One would hardly count on his assisting us.”

“For the dowager’s sake,” Jago said. “One believes he would order it for her. Not for us, never for us, but possibly for her.”

“In Shejidan,” Tano said, “his messengers can enter the Guild Hall reasonably unremarked, under far less threat of hostile measures from the Kadigidi. And they can present the facts of the heir’s claim.”

“But to claim the succession—that would seem as if the Atageini think Tabini is dead, nadiin-ji.” He was far from sure that turning their support from Tabini to Cajeiri was a good idea. “And would it not look as if we support that theory?”

“Much as if,” Banichi allowed. “But if Atageini representatives can get the debate in the Guild centered on that topic, bypassing all the suspended question of their support for Tabini-aiji, and if, through that debate, we can inject evidence backing Tabini-aiji’s policies, there is some hope of presenting the report. By that means, the Atageini might prepare Guild support for the aiji’s position should he appear.”

His mind hared off in twenty different directions at once, Tabini’s safety, Tabini’s reaction, even Tabini’s sense of betrayal if he should appear to support Cajeiri’s claim.

Most of all, the volatile controversy of his own influence in the administration… because his influence was going to be the sticking-point in any presentation a third party made to the Guild regarding the mission that had cost the aishidi’tat so much. From the atevi end of the telescope, thinking what the Atageini might say, he saw the situation much more clearly. Very honest people viewed him as a long-standing and pernicious influence on Tabini-aiji, a human, an interloper whose advice was primarily responsible for all the difficulties the aishidi’tat was in now. Very honest people had reasons to support some other authority, no matter how objectionable on all other grounds.

Small wonder he hadn’t been able to persuade his brain to come up with the right words: he was the problem, and nobody he intended to speak to was going to hear him except through a filter that said all his past advice had been wrong, no matter how well-intentioned. That was what his better sense was trying to tell him. It was why the Guild hadn’t backed Tabini against this insurgency—and why in hell would it then listen to the paidhi’s arguments?

He drew a deep breath, facing these unpleasant truths. “But if all they hear, nadiin, is that I am here with the heir, what can they think? And if they cannot be made to understand that our judgement regarding the space program was correct and cannot be assured that their sacrifice was necessary—I am not sure Cajeiri will win any case with your Guild or with the legislature. If they cast Tabini aside because they detest my influence—where has Cajeiri been, but with me, for the last two years?”

“The paidhi has many allies,” Tano said staunchly, “who hold a very different opinion of his actions. People will rise to support us, nandi. I have no doubt. They only want to choose the right moment.”

Certainly he had faithful staff, in his apartment in the Bu-javid—who were likely dispossessed, if not worse. He had a secretarial staff, an entire office in Shejidan, loyal, gentle people who might have lost their jobs and found it precious hard to find others—if not worse. And he could not imagine that band of dedicated individuals facing down Tasigin assassins with a stack of contradictory records and soft protestations about right and reason and cross-species logic.

“I am not so sanguine about their chances of surviving the present troubles,” he said. “And if I cannot persuade Lord Tatiseigi—or even persuade him to listen to me—”

About the mission to Reunion, no chance. Not as things now stood.

But about the boy’s rights, and therefore Tatiseigi’s rights, and the need to advance them forcefully…

“He would want the boy to make that claim, would he not, nadiin-ji?”

“Exactly so,” Banichi said. “Exactly so, Bren-ji.”

“Endangering him.”

“He is already in danger, in danger, and without Guild protection, excepting those of us under this roof.”

“And what is there to support him, Banichi-ji?”

“The backing of Lord Tatiseigi, and a letter from the paidhi-aiji,” Banichi said, with an uncharacteristic leap of faith. Faith placed in him, God help them all.

And if the plight of his long-suffering on-world staff was a burden on his heart, that earnest look from Banichi, of all people, lowered a crushing, overwhelming weight onto his shoulders.

“What could one reasonably say in a letter to convince those who have been injured by my advice, Banichi-ji? I hoped to speak to Lord Tatiseigi after breakfast. I could not even secure that audience.”

“The dowager had her own notions,” Jago said, “and did not permit it.”

Did that mean as much as he thought it could mean?

“Why not?”

“She is the one Tatiseigi knows, and the one who should deal with him.” Jago said. “Which is probably prudent, nadi-ji.”

“But if I cannot persuade him—”

“Never, when the matter at issue is whether Ilisidi is on his side. That is personal, nandi, and your arguments can have no effect there.”

An old liaison—one almost thought love affair, humanly speaking, but of course it wasn’t that. Man’chi was tangled in it, who could trust whom, who would tell the truth, and who might be lying, and Ilisidi outranked the paidhi—his opinion could not break ranks with hers. Not in the way atevi nerves were wired.

“You mean I shall have no chance to convince him, nadiin-ji?”

“She will,” Jago said. “She has done a great deal to convince him already. She is here, Bren-ji.”

Blind human, that was to say. At times the ground he thought he knew developed deep chasms of atevi logic. Stay out of it, their nerves were telling them, don’t try to intervene in this mine field. And back the boy to be aiji, in his father’s place.

“If I back—” he began to say, the rest of the sentence being, Cajeiri as aiji—would it not betray Tabini? But he stopped there: the whole point of what they were saying was that the paidhi could not break ranks and set himself forward, ahead of the dowager, ahead of Tatiseigi, even ahead of Cajeiri, not in something that regarded the man’chi of atevi toward their leadership.

“I have records. I have brought images, in my computer, to support my argument. If I only send them and did not appear myself, nadiin-ji, people can say these images are only television. I can provide the images to the Atageini—if there is a computer in this house. But I should present them in Shejidan. I do not want to betray Tabini by supporting another aiji, even his son. I do not want to lose the argument in Shejidan, either. Most of all, I do not want to see the kyo show up here and find only humans to answer for this planet, when they have not done outstandingly well at communicating with them in the first place.”

“There is a proverb in our Guild,” Banichi said in his low voice. “One Assassin is enough. One assassin can overturn the vote and the good will of thousands. We are not speaking of the whole population. We are speaking of skilled attack. You should not go anywhere, until there is a request you go and an escort to make it likely you will arrive. Let them call you to speak. As they will. We have every confidence in them, if not in the higher powers of the government.”

“Speed is critical in getting Tatiseigi to send any messengers he may send before the Guild,” Tano said… always deferring to Banichi and Jago, but since his long stay in command of the stationside household, having an opinion of his own. “The longer the delay, the more likely the Kadigidi will get wind of our presence and attack us here.”

“No question,” Algini said.

“Then if the Atageini messengers should go, nadiin-ji,” Bren said. The words had a hollow, ominous sound in his own ears. “If they do go, and if there is any stir about it, the Kadigidi will certainly know where we are, and they will blame Lord Tatiseigi publicly for sheltering us. Certainly they will know we are under this roof when Atageini messengers appear in Shejidan. And, forgive me, how long will Lord Tatiseigi remain well-disposed to our cause once Kadigidi assassins blow more holes in the lily frescoes?”

Laughter, from the grimmest of professions. It was a notorious event. “Such a move will not win the Kadigidi favor with him,” Jago said.

“But can this house withstand a direct attack, nadiin-ji? This is not Malguri.”

“It has a few more defenses than seems,” Banichi said. Electronics, Banichi implied. Electronics. In this most kabiu of households. It would be a surprise to him. “More downstairs than up—the security in this room is alarmingly thin.”

“Cenedi suggests we move out and spare us finding out the answers to these questions,” Jago said. “It is not, he says, in our interests that the Kadigidi and the Atageini go at each others’ throats yet. But the dowager strongly resists this notion and wishes to provoke Guild notice and to insist on a hearing. She assuredly wishes to get you before the Guild, nandi.”

Forestalling him, at breakfast. Keeping the argument all on her terms.

“One would hesitate to question the dowager’s grasp of politics,” Bren said ruefully, which was the very truth, and his heart felt the chill of old experience with the dowager and her willingness to charge downhill. If Ilisidi was making her move, just in being here, and Cenedi was trying to advise against it, the fat was already in the fire, so to speak, and the Kadigidi would move. Fast.

“Perhaps I should prepare a convincing letter,” he said, “so we can offer it, at least, if this mission is in fact to go to the Guild.”

“If the paidhi sees fit,” Jago said, and Banichi said:

“A very good idea. A letter at least to confirm the dowager’s assertions.”

A letter which must be written by hand, not printed out from a computer: a computer-written message was not kabiu on so formal an occasion as a Guild hearing, even if the house had the requisite printer, and he would not offend this house by asking.

But writing it out first and copying it fair would save time, ink and paper… granted they could lay hands on paper. Granted only they could persuade the Atageini to carry it.

“I shall do it,” he said, committing himself to the course of action. “I shall need pen, paper and the wax-jack. I shall provide Tatiseigi a copy, for his own reading. Might there be tea?”

They scattered on their various missions and he opened up his computer and stared at a blank screen.

Shut his eyes a moment, seeing steel corridors. Seeing forest paths where they had ridden. So many realities.

Then:

The paidhi-aiji to the honored members of the Assassins’ Guild.

That much was easy. No reference to his lordly title in the heavens, just the ordinary one, the one he lived by, and hoped to continue to live by.

One is privileged to report to this august body that the aiji-dowager’s mission to the distant station succeeded in every point. This mission prevented a powerful spaceborne nation, neither atevi nor human, from advancing against this world with deadly force in its mistaken notions of offense emanating from here. By the extreme effort and sacrifice of the aishidi’tat in organizing this mission, and also thanks to the foresight of Tabini-aiji in sending the aiji-dowager as a high emissary on this mission, all matters have carried well. These foreigners, grievously provoked by human exploration in their territory, have been considerably mollified by negotiation with the aiji’s close relatives and now accept the explanation advanced by the aiji-dowager that the binding authority of the world is indisputably atevi, and that atevi will not permit further provocations against them. More, we have removed the human authority responsible for this provocation and placed them under the authority of the atevi space station…

Atevi space station. That was a reach. But it was the situation Tabini insisted on, and had been fairly well on his way to having, before this catastrophe.

… making it absolutely essential that atevi shuttles maintain regular flights, to keep a firm hand on that situation, and to maintain atevi authority.

In the other matter, understanding that a wise and enlightened ruler sits in command of the situation here, namely Tabini-aiji, these new foreigners have settled a preliminary peace with the aishidi’tat, a situation which gives the aishidi’tat great advantage over other claimants to authority in the heavens, if the aishidi’tat will seize this opportunity and exert this new authority. The paidhi-aiji is ready to appear before the Guild to render a full account of these complex events, in the name of the aiji-dowager and the heir, and to present visual and documentary proofs of all events. Meanwhile, one urgently requests the Guild support the dowager, the heir, and the reputation of Tabini-aiji, by whose foresight peace was achieved, and on which peace now depends.

A rare moment of brilliance, if he did say so himself. Occasionally the words were just there, ready to spring out.

At such moments of overwhelming self-confidence—well to ask an impartial observer. He called Jago, who surveyed it both for felicity and persuasion.

“Excellent,” she said, “excellently worded, nandi.”

“I shall write it out,” he said, and carefully did so, in his most formal script, provided a reading copy for Lord Tatiseigi, a second one for the dowager, and affixed the paidhi’s seal in wax to the actual missive. He weighed it in his hand, looked at the computer screen to assure himself that he had nowhere hinted the darker thoughts of his heart, such as the damnable paralysis of your Guild or your general policy, which arises from willful ignorance, corruption, and scientific illiteracy of certain members. He thought those thoughts. God, he thought them, with such force it seemed impossible they had not branded themselves on the paper in his own handwriting.

But he had been politic throughout. He had flattered. He had told the minimal truth. He had promised—literally—the sun, the moon, and the stars, if they would come to their senses and take authority. The alternatives were not pretty… three bands of humans trying to deal with the aliens they had thus far only antagonized.

He brought the letter and the copies to Jago, watched her take them out the door, and let go a deep breath, wishing every syllable had been perfect, which now he knew was not the case, wishing he had been brilliant, which he was completely dubious was the case, wishing he could miraculously transport himself to the dowager’s vicinity to watch her reaction and answer questions; and to Tatiseigi’s, after that.

And there was the question, the very good question, whether, even if the dowager wished it, the letter would ever get past Tatiseigi’s grounds. The dowager would have to approve it before the next copy went to Tatiseigi, and Tatiseigi would have to approve it to get it out the door.

He walked to the open window, and gazed out on the cultivated fields, the broad expanses of grassland that lay behind the very ineffective walls of the estate.

Beyond those fields, barring the horizon, rose wooded hills; and beyond them the eye could find a faint haze where a range of snow-covered mountains would stand, if the mountains were being cooperative today. Today a stranger who didn’t know such mountains existed would assume that haze was sky, the continent unbarriered. He would think there was no split between east and west.

Would history not have been different, if that were the case? Would history not have rolled over the human landing on this world, if that were the case? The western atevi were an inquisitive progressive lot, exceedingly prone to investigate, to take an oddity in the hand and look at it carefully. Humans had landed on Mospheira, and had ended up on the mainland, briefly. The mainland atevi, the westerners, had been astonishingly outgoing and accepting… until the war. A landing on the other end of the continent—just a little rotation of the world away—and there would have been no human presence left on the planet, in very short order. Ilisidi’s people, Ilisidi’s neighbors’ forebears, would have obliterated any human landing, no great number of questions asked.