Inheritor

He expected an explosion at least of equivalent magnitude. “Nadi,” Jase began in Ragi, and then again, “What do I have to do to have you on my side, nadi?”

“I amon your side!” He dropped his voice, moved close and seized Jase by the lapels long enough to bring his lips to Jase’s ear. “Bug,” was all he whispered, and Jase went wooden in his grip and very quiet.

“Just stay here,” Bren said aloud and let go.

And left.

Downstairs again, toward their makeshift banquet hall, where nothing had much changed except most of the security was on their feet, the servants were cleaning up, and Ilisidi was still seated, her cane, however, in her hands, and her chair angled at forty-five degrees to the table.

“Well,” Ilisidi said, as if he satisfied expectations by appearing.

“Tano-ji,” he said in passing, though it was an act of temerity to give orders to Tano, or to give orders to anyone in Ilisidi’s hall, “keep an eye on Jase, please.”

“Yes,” Tano said as Bren came to Ilisidi.

“Dowager-ji,” Bren said, “first, forgive my associate his lack of understanding.”

There was a nod, with amiable quiet.

“And forgive me mine. But, nand’ dowager, is there anything I may ask in confidence?”

“What do you wish to know, nand’ paidhi?”

“Why is that boy here, aiji-ma?”

Ilisidi braced the ferrule of her cane against the irregular stones of the floor and leaned forward. “A good question. Cenedi-ji, whyis this boy here?”

“He is young, he is intemperate, he lacks all finesse, and he believes he alone holds vital information about a threat to global peace.”

He guessed, then, what that information might concern: a dweller on the island, near the runaway transmissions.

“Well-intentioned, then,” he said.

“One believes so.”

“Nandiin,” Algini said quietly, Algini, who tended to pick up the small details, “he has repeatedly attempted to reach the paidhi—or the aiji. He seems not at all particular.”

“Well, well,” Ilisidi said. “Let’s have a look at him. Nand’ paidhi, do you wish to hear the matter, or not?”

“I shall gladly hear it,” he murmured, “aiji-ma.” His brain was racing meanwhile and he had Jago but not Banichi or Tano within the field of his vision. He thought that if there were a problem developing between him and Ilisidi he would see Jago’s signal to withdraw once Ilisidi said that.

But at a certain point he had to rely on them and theirman’chi to Tabini. He had never quite so much realized what it might be to stand in the middle of a sort-out of atevi loyalties, blind in his human heart of hearts to what might be going on in atevi; but knowing emotionally, human-fashion, that his heart was with Banichi and Jago, that his duty insisted on Tabini, and that friendship, yes, friendship, wanted Tabini and Ilisidi both to listen to him and not tear the world apart.

Stupid, stupid, to have it any other way, and he would not believethat Ilisidi was ready to make such moves, or that Tabini had so misread his grandmother in sending them out here.

Cenedi had made a call on his pocket com, and in not very long black-uniformed security came in from the front door, among them Banichi and several of their own, among Ilisidi’s; and with them, a figure in black—the fool, Bren thought—handcuffed and disheveled, and looking for all the world like a scared kid.

“Nand’ paidhi!” the boy said.

“Young fool,” Ilisidi said, and had his attention—at which point said young fool seemed to realize (surely he’d known the paidhi was here when he invaded the place) that he was in far deeper trouble. The boy grew quiet, and bowed as respectfully as one could in handcuffs and being restrained by two of the largest of Ilisidi’s young men.

“The paidhi-aiji has a question for you,” Ilisidi said. “Perhaps you will give him the courtesy of an answer?”

“Aiji-ma, yes, if it please your ladyship.”

“Nand’ paidhi?”

“Nand’ Rejiri of Dur-wajran?”

“Yes, nand’ paidhi.”

“Why did you—?” Attempt to fly into my plane? That was surely not the intent. That was just a pilot inexperienced at that airport. “—come to Shejidan?”

“To tell the aiji there’s treason.”

“Then why pursue me?”

“Because your lordship could tell the aiji I wasn’t a fool!”

Therewas a circular argument.

“I truly never expressed to the aiji that you were one.” But the case was clear to him, now: the boy, humiliated, his plane impounded after near collision with the aiji’s own plane, couldn’t even hope for a hearing that wouldn’t involve a plane, the ATC, and his father, a lord of the Association.

And this was a very upset young man, as shaken and as distraught as he’d ever seen an ateva become. “So,” he said to the young man, “the aiji-dowager is listening to every word. What will you say, regarding this treason?”

And hope to God the treason wasn’t something Ilisidi was involved in. The boy couldn’t know, any more than he could, unless his information accidentally involved Ilisidi’s associates or activities, which he truly didn’t think.

“Radios,” the boy said. “And humans, nand’ dowager. I’m not making it up.”

“Go on about these radios and humans,” Ilisidi said, seated like an aiji in court, indeed, with her silver-headed cane in her wrinkled hands and her yellow eyes sharp and absolutely uncommunicative. “What do you say, nadi?”

“That—” Having gotten permission, the young man lost all control over his breathing. “That a plane keeps going out and flying over the ocean, aiji-ma, and you can hear it talking with somebody who speaks Ragi, but who sounds like a human.”

“Female, nadi?” Bren asked.

“On the radio—I don’t know. I think it might be, nand’ paidhi. One—one would hesitate to say—”

Bang! went the cane on the paving-stones. “And you were where, when you heard these things?”

“In my father’s plane, aiji-ma.”

“So you immediately flew to Shejidan and scared hell out of the aiji’s pilot.”

“Aiji-ma—” The young man was rattled. Badly.

“Could you not have made a phone call?”

“I was afraid—I was afraid it had to go through somewhere—”

“You could have told your father, young man.”

There was a flicker of fear, real fear, in the young man’s expression. “I stole the plane, aiji-ma.”

“Keeping your father out of the notoriety, are you, nadi? The hell you stole it!”

“Aiji-ma, I stole his plane.”

The paidhi himself would not like to have been the recipient of that look, in that position; and he had been, both.

“So,” Ilisidi said, “what else do you know? Notfrom this plane. From your own sense and the gossip of your elders, what do you know?”

“The man’chi of my house is to the descendants of Barjida, nand’ dowager.”

That was a neat piece of evasion—to the Barjidi, meaning Tabini’s line at the time of the War. Ilisidi was marriedinto that line, not born to it, and it was a man’chi predating the present Ragi aiji but including him. He was in a damned machimi play and the kid was doing a piece of footwork either his father regularly did or that he’d seen on television, the classic cousin-to-the-line who turned out to have a knife on his person.

But it wasn’t television, and the smile Ilisidi gave him was a dangerous, dangerous thing, while—the human tumbled to the fact slowly, being dead to atevi emotions— hewas in exactly the same position, appointed and protected by the Barjida’s descendant, Tabini-aiji.

Who had sent him here. Who had sent—God! Banichi and Jago—here.

The same team the aiji had sent to kill Saigimi—here, inside Ilisidi’s defenses. He’dseen this game before, the extreme gesture, this insertion of someone deadly dangerous as Banichi and Jago along with the very vulnerable paidhi inside Ilisidi’s defenses—challenging the dowager to make an overt move against him.

Or to take his pledge of alliance.

It was hard to keep his calm. But he stood there expressionless, having realized exactlywhat he’d been playing with when he’d taken Jase to Ilisidi.

He’d walked right into an operation of some kind, a thorn-patch where atevi could feel their way and he had to find it by sheer logic.

Did it feelright to Banichi and Jago right now? Did it feelright to Ilisidi and Cenedi? Or were atevi on one side or the other reaching some pitch of decision that would come crashing down?

Hadn’t he said it? The ship would send another one. So would the island.

No. No. Tabini couldn’t count on anyonemore on his side than he was if he shot Deana and demanded the backup to her. Which might say something about his own sanity—but it wasan atevi consideration, for a species that feltsomething about man’chi and its direction: a lord didn’t attack his own—ask them to die, yes, send them to die, yes, but not without gain to him and his partisans.

Either Tabini was very sure of Ilisidi—now—or ready to take a loss that would not be inconsiderable to his power, a sacrifice of a very major piece for nogain commensurate with the loss.

“So,” Ilisidi said in a tone of restrained anger. “If your man’chi is to the Barjidi, ifyou have sought the paidhi-aiji, perhaps you will deliver your information to the paidhi.”

The boy’s glance at him was instant and distraught. “I wish you to deliver what you have to say to the aiji-dowager,” Bren said, “as a lord in whom I have confidence.”

Clearly the boy looked marginally relieved. But scared. And going through layers upon layers in his mind, surely. He bowed one more time.“I heard people plotting against the aiji, nand’ dowager. I haven’t lied, nand’ dowager.”

“Young and foolish,” Ilisidi said. “What have you observed?”

“This human person. These pilots. Radios that move about the countryside and operate on the trains.”

On the trains, Bren thought in surprise. Of coursethat would be one way to get a broadcast into some remote village, trains passing through, radios operating on the public bands, on or off by turns.

But Tabini had to be aware of such things going on.

So must Ilisidi.

“Who would do such things?” Ilisidi asked.

“People who say the aiji is turning us over to humans.”

“Oh, and one day, one certain day some internal computer chip will make all our machines fail as the ship rains death-rays down on us and the humans pour off the island to ruin us—have you heard that one, nand’ paidhi?”

“No, aiji-ma, I have not.”

“More rational ones say that the ship itself is meant to fail, to bring down the government by that failure, and that the means will be a technical fault introduced through the designs themselves.”

He had heard that argued soberly in the council rooms of the legislature. “There are numerous reasons that’s not the case, nand’ dowager.”

“One has confidence in your confidence, nand’ paidhi. But you are sopersuasive.—What do yousay, young man?”

“About—”

The cane banged the pavement. “Your wits, boy! What werewe talking about?”

“About the aiji turning us over to humans, nand’ dowager.”

Ilisidi leaned forward, her hands clasped on the cane. “Do youbelieve it?”

“No, nand’ dowager.”

“Does your father the lord of Dur-wajran believe it?”

“No, nand’ dowager. We are—”

“—in the man’chi of the Barjidi.”

“And to all who support the aiji, nand’ dowager.”

“Does birthing the ingrate’s fathersettle me in the Barjidi man’chi?”

“If you will it to, nand’ dowager.”

Clearly the boy was losing his composure but not necessarily his wits. But a game of wits with the dowager was not one any boy could win.

“Say that my ingrate grandson and I should have the same interest,” Ilisidi said, leaning back, carefully skirting the question of whether she had an overlord, which was private and privileged information, but she admitted, for the first time he had ever heard, to associationwith Tabini. After years living among atevi a human could begin to hope he had the straight of it. “And say that your father, within the man’chi of the Barjidi, has sent his son to Shejidan—”

“My father never sent me—”

Bang! went the cane. “The hell, boy! Your father sent you when the assassination of lord Saigimi shook the inattentive out of bed from here to Malguri! You flew immediately to Shejidan, accidentally arriving inthe flight path of the aiji’s plane, and were involved with the tightened security so you could by no means deliver your message, which you have regularly attempted to inflict upon the paidhi! Am I correct!”

There was a small silence, a chastened demeanor. “Yes, nand’ dowager.”

“Why now? Why not earlier?”

“Because we didn’t know the aiji might not know. Because if it wasimportant, the aiji should know, nand’ dowager.”

“Going quickly and by stealth through the skies.”

“Yes, nand’ dowager.” The boy bowed his head. “I broke the law. I knew I broke it.”

“And broke it again coming here!”

“No, nand’ dowager. I took the train.”

Rarely did anyone get a reaction from the dowager when she was in thismood. The brows went up and crashed down, hard. “I mean coming through the barriers, young man! How did you know to come here!”

“It’s all over—” The boy took a breath. “All over the province, all over the country, I think, nand’ dowager.”

“You, young man, will go with my security, you will stay in your room, and in the stead of your father, who is in the man’chi of my ungrateful grandson, you will take orders from me, do you hear, or I will shoot you with my own hand.”

“ Yes, nand’ dowager.”

“Take him elsewhere!” Ilisidi said, and members of her staff collected the young man. “See he gets supper.”

The boy put up no argument about it. And Ilisidi, leaning on her cane, rose with a frown on her face.

“By train, indeed. Before we took off this morning, the boy left the capital. And changed trains.—nand’ paidhi.”

“Aiji-ma.”

“Radios. Radios, do you understand?”

“I have heard the rumor.”

A wave of Ilisidi’s hand. “To bed, to bed. Don’t concern yourself with tomorrow. We’ll go riding. Perhaps we’ll have a look at the sea and satisfy this intemperate young man you’ve brought me. He’s beginning to be interesting.”

He hesitated, then thought better of questioning Ilisidi.

“Aiji-ma,” he said, and turned and went for the steps, thinking that he had to get a few minutes alone with his security.

He heard someone behind him. He didn’t want to look and find out until he reached the privacy of the floor above.

Then he turned.

“Jago-ji.”

“Nand’ paidhi.”

“Nand’ paidhi,” he echoed, in not-quite-mock despair. “ Talkto me, Jago-ji.”

“My room,” Jago said.

He wasn’teager, now, to get himself into interpersonal maneuverings. But hehad a roommate. So did she, but Banichi was downstairs. Jase was in bed, and not, besides, the person he wanted to overhear a frank talk between himself and the aiji’s security about the aiji’s grandmother—besides, twice, his room was probably bugged.

He walked in that direction. She did, and opened the door and let him in.

He stood while she lit a match, and a candle. It was a room no different from his, except for the stack of baggage in the corner, a stack of mostly black objects.

He shut the door. And Jago looked at him, her eyes reflecting a disconcerting shimmer of gold.

“Are we safe with the dowager?” he whispered.

“One believes so, nand’ paidhi.”

Nand’ paidhi. He was vaguely disappointed. About what, he didn’t know, and told himself he was a fool, but he couldn’t but be conscious of her as someone he’d intimately trusted half a year ago; and he felt—he wasn’t sure. Set aside. Something like that.

“The aiji is aware of the situation,” Jago said, and then, straight-faced. “Should we whisper?”

At first he was moved to laugh and then thought of Jase next door.

“Our hearing isn’t that acute,” he said in a low voice. “What’s going on, Jago-ji? As much as you can tell me. I’ll rely on you to care for the rest.”

“In brief, nadi, it’s common knowledge the paidhiin are vacationing in the province. It was a news item yesterday evening, so the boy’s appearance is far from amazing.”

“Tabini is using us for hunting-bait.”

“One would hesitate to put it so inelegantly.”

“But true. Is it not?”

“True.”

“Meaning persons of ill intent will flock here.—Mogari-nai and the earth station are right across the hill, nadi! We’ll draw harm to it!”

A small pause. “Tabini-aiji has considered that proximity.”

Not among things the paidhi should know, then. Gunshots on the lawn.

Or such a lawn as this fallen-down place had.

“Don’t be out of countenance, nand’ paidhi. There is a purpose.”

“What purpose?” He tried not to become emotional, which only set atevi on the defensive with that, and not the issue. “I ask you, nadi, whom I greatly respect, are our interests protected?”

“By us, nadi.”

“I always have confidence in that, but, nadi—” He didn’t know what to say that Jago would understand. After all they’d been through they were back to that, and it was late, and he was not as sharp as he might have been an hour ago, or he was emotionally rattled and trying to think in too many different directions at once.

“What do you wish to say, nadi?” Jago asked.

He looked up at her, in the dark and the dim light that picked out the sparks of metal on her jacket, the gloss of her black skin, the gold shimmer of her steady gaze. And looked down and aside, because there just was no rational approach and the translator had no words. He wanted to ask what Tabini had in mind and he didn’t. He found himself in emotional danger, was what, and he had every reason to be concerned for himself.

“I’d better go,” he said, and reached back to the latch and ran into the door edge on his way out of this room.

“Nadi?” he heard behind him, quietly. Jago was confused, in itself a sign of the dangerous way he was dealing with things.

He went to his own room, and inside. The candle had burned down to half. Jase was in bed, a lump in the blankets, and didn’t react to his coming in.

He stripped down to his underwear in the biting cold from the slit window, was a little conscious of the exposure to that window, and snipers, even as small as that exposure was, and then told himself that there was some kind of electronic perimeter that had warned them of the boy’s approach, and that there was probably one of Ilisidi’s men posted to guard all those windows, which were certainly too small for an adult ateva, so the hell with it, he said to himself. He had to trust the security. He had no choice.

He sighted a line between there and the end of the bed, and blew out the candle. He managed the transit most of the way, bashed his leg on the far corner post of the bed, and drew a deep breath from Jase.

“Is that you?”

“So far as I know,” he muttered, settled from cold air to a cold bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. Jase was a warmth beside him. He shivered and tried not to.

“Find out anything?”

The brain wasn’t primed to work. Other things had been in operation. He tried to recover where he’d left Jase in the information flow. “Kid’s not a threat,” he said. And remembered Jase didn’t know anything about anything except they weren’t at the beach and Jase wanted to go fishing.

God save them.

“I imagine we’ll go riding tomorrow morning. Just be patient. We might ride down to the beach.”

“Can you get there from here?”

“Far as I know. Or we might go up to Mogari-nai. It’s near here. There’s an old site there.”

“Why are we visiting all these old things?”

The question astonished him. But professional judgment cut in and informed him that it might be ship-culture at work.

And where was Jase to learn the value of anything historic, if his world was the ship?

And where was Jase to derive the value of rare species? Or the concept of saving the ecology, if Jase’s view was that of a steel ship and lights that kept a computer’s schedule?

Where did one start?

“Understand,” he said calmly, into the dark above his head, “that the preservation of all life on this planet is of great value, the animals, the plants, all valuable. So is the record of what lies in the past. Accept that this is valuable, not only to the dowager, but to me. Can you imagine that? They’re not just old places.”

“I—” Jase said. “I found it very strange to handle the descent pod. To walk in the station corridors. It was—a very lonely place. Very old.”

“Atevi feel the same about such places as this. Only add a thousand years to the account. On Mospheira, when you walk into the old earth base command center, and you see all the clocks stopped, on the minute the power went—in the War—Mospheirans feel something like that. So don’t call it ‘old places.’ They’re more than that. And you know more than that. Clearly you do.”

There was a long silence. Just a living presence in the dark.

“We anticipated—a great deal—” Jase said in a quiet voice, in the human language, “getting here. We didn’t know what we’d find. We imagined there’d be changes. But when the station didn’t answer our hail, we feared everyone had died.”

He tried to imagine that. “It must have been a frightening moment.”

“Frightening for a long time, while we were moving in. The systems wouldn’t respond. Shut down, on conserve, was what we found. But we didn’t know. We were really glad when we found there were human beings alive down here.”

“And when you knew atevi had advanced so far?” It was amazing that they hadn’t had this conversation already, but they hadn’t. “How did you feel?”

“Hopeful,” Jase said. “Really hopeful. We were gladof it, Bren, I swear to you.”

“I think I believe that.” He did. “Unfortunately it’s not a hundred percent that way on Mospheira.”

“The resources,” Jase said, “are on thisside of the strait.”

“There are powers on both sides,” Bren said, “that want something besides atevi in space.” He took a chance. “What does the ship want?”

A little silence there, just a little silence. “The ship wants somebodyup there that can repair what’s broken.”

“Wasn’t that why the colonists and the crew went separate ways at the beginning? Colonists wouldn’t bea cheap labor force?”

“It’s not like that,” Jase said. “It won’t belike that.”

“Damn right,” Bren said, “it won’t belike that.”

But they meant, he was sure, different things.

There was silence, then. Maybe Jase thought the topic was getting too dangerous. Maybe, and it was his own notion, there was just nothing they could say to each other until that ship flew, and until they had options.

His mother might have had surgery by now, he thought. He didn’t know. He thought, hell, he was within driving distance of the biggest communications post in the world, and he couldn’t get a damn telephone? The communications his security had was instant and connected to everywhere but Mospheira. He should have asked for a phone.

He had the whole weight of the atevi government if he wanted to try to extract information, but the whole weight of the atevi government had to be used for atevi purposes and affairs of state, not, dammit, news from his family.

He stared at the dark above him and asked himself what kind of an impression he’d made on Jago, bolting from the room the way he’d done.

He’d have been warmer, distracted from his other problems, at least.

But Banichi would have come in for the night.

He didn’t know what he’d have done, or said, or what he’d have explained. Likely Jago and Banichi both would have been amused. He wasn’t sure he was capable of laughing at the joke. Not tonight, not now, not as things were.

He heard a quiet snoring beside him. Jase at least was tired enough to sleep. He thought of elbowing Jase in the ribs so hecould rest; but he decided it wasn’t that likely he would for a while.

Rest, however, just lying on his back on a surface that didn’t move, piled high with blankets in a bed that was getting warm in air that was almost cold enough for frost…

He heard an engine.

Distant, but clearly an engine where none belonged.

No reason to be alarmed. There was a perimeter set.

His security was not going to allow anything to slip up on them. Neither was Ilisidi’s.

But what in hell? he wondered.

He heard it come closer, and closer, and finally saw the faintest hint of light touch the wall and vanish.

More engines—than lights.

Vehicles were moving about inside the perimeter.

The snoring had stopped.

“What’s that?” Jase asked. In Ragi.

“I don’t know.” He flung the blankets aside and got up, barefoot, in his underwear, and felt his way around the end of the bed. He went to the window, in the cold draft, as Jase got up on his side of the bed and joined him in looking out.

“Security, maybe?” Jase asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing Jago made me aware of.”

“You suppose everything’s all right?”

It was on a side of the building not exposed to their view. The back side, he thought. As the vehicles had come up from that side.

There was a time he’d have run to Jago a couple of doors down and asked for explanation. But this time the conspiracy was of his arranging, and he still didn’t know the extent of it.

He had a sinking feeling if he asked Jago she wouldn’t know, either. And that if anything were wrong he’d hear about it from Jago and from Banichi.

Hell, he hadn’tsurvived this long by leaving assumptions lie.

“Stay here,” he said to Jase and, numb beyond feeling, snatched a blanket for decency and went out into the hall.

It was dark, excepting the candles.

And one of Ilisidi’s young men, who stood in the shadows, whose eyes cast back the light.

“What is it?” he asked the man.

“Supplies and such,” the man said. “Sleep peacefully, nand’ paidhi.”

“Banichi,” he called out, worried that the mere opening of his door hadn’t brought his security out of the soundest sleep. “Jago?”

“One believes they’re helping below, nand’ paidhi.”

“I’ll talk to them,” he said. “You have communications.”

“Yes, nand’ paidhi.” The man drew the pocket com out and flicked the switch. “Nandi. The paidhi would wish to speak to his security.”

There was a reply he couldn’t hear: the man had it against his ear. But he gave it to Bren.

“Banichi-ji?” he asked.

“ Bren-ji?” It was Banichi, he had no doubt of that voice. “ Is there a problem?”

“Is there reason for us to get dressed and come down?”

“ No, nadi. Go to sleep. Everything is fine. We’ll be early to rise.”

“Well enough, then. Good night. Take care, nadi-ji.” He handed the com back to its owner, feeling foolish on the one hand, himself with frozen feet and one frozen shoulder, and gave a courteous sketch of a bow, having doubted the man’s authority, before going back to the room.

Jase had lit a candle. It was something Jase had seen servants do. From him, it was a piece of ingenuity. Jase stood there holding it, in his underwear, shielding the light from the gust produced by the door and the window.

“What’s happening?” Jase whispered.

“It’s all right.” He didn’t whisper. He whisked the blanket off and put it back on the bed. Tucked the foot of it in.

And got in. Jase said, “I hurt my leg getting the matches.”

Jase had. He could see the skinned knee. Jase had taken a fall in the dark and he was mad.

“Sorry. Want a bandage? I’m sure the man outside can get one.”

“No,” Jase said, brought the candle to bed and then went back after something, probably the matches. It wasn’t natural to think of both. Not in Jase’s world.

Jase blew the light out and, Bren guessed, set the candle and the matches on the floor beside the bed and got in, half frozen, Bren was sure. He felt Jase’s silence as a reproach. He’d deceived Jase too often, too long, and now Jase took for granted that was the final answer: it wasn’t just Jase’s rules-following soul.

“I’m a little worried,” he said to Jase.

There was no answer. Jase wasmad; and shivering beside him, which might be the cold sheets; and might be the situation.

“I don’t think they want us to know everything that’s happening,” Bren said. “Jase, I’m telling you the truth, things may be all right. But there’s been a lot going on in the world, and it’s just possible things are a bit more complicated than seemed.”

“You want me to ask.”

He didn’t even know what he was trying to say. “I just want you to know—I asked the dowager to show you the old ways. I wanted to help you. I wanted you to have the advantage I’ve had—in learning about atevi.”

“So I won’t make a fool of myself?”

It was his turn to be quiet. Jase had a knack, as he supposed he did, for taking the most delicately offered sentiment, and turning it inside out.

“Thanks,” Jase said after a while. “Thanks for the thought.”

Bren was still mad. And still didn’t think Jase remotely understood him. And didn’t want to get his adrenaline up any higher when he was trying to sleep.

“I’ve done the best I know how,” he said to Jase finally. “I’ve tried to teach you.”

The silence hung there a moment. From both sides.

Then Jase said, “I’ve tried to learn.”

“I know that. You’ve done a brilliant job.”

“Years left to get better at it,” Jase said. “Got to. Ship’s got to fly.”

“Yeah,” he said. It was disappointing, in his view, that he couldn’t make Jase like life here, where he was. But whatever motivated Jase to study, whatever kept him wanting to go back, that was what he ought to encourage.

And Jase wanted to get back to his mother. He understood that part. Obligations. Divisions. Desperation.

He didn’t know how his own was doing, or whether calls might have come in—if anything went wrong, surely Toby would call him.

“So what’s going on out there?” Jase asked him.

Deep breath. “I think a number of vans or something came in.” More motors than lights. He didn’t mention that. One running with lights. The rest without. The electronic perimeter admitting them.

“So what did the guard say?”

“Supplies. Breakfast, maybe.” He couldn’t but think of the geography of the place—Mogari-nai, which was reachable by air and by a road up from the modern town of Saduri; and the town and the airport down one face of a steep rise on which this ancient fortress was posed, that faced Geigi on one side; and on the other side, the island of Dur.

Whose young heir was locked in for the night, he supposed. They didn’t have keys for the bedrooms, but he’d about bet they’d found one for wherever they were keeping the boy.

What might be going on out there might involve calling the lord of Dur-wajran and informing him they now had a young idiot who could be reclaimed for suitable forthcoming information on the other side.

Politics. Tabini. The dowager. And those damned radio transmissions.

18

They walked out the front door and down the steps together, with the dawn coloring the sky, Ilisidi and Cenedi in the lead, and the rest of them, except the servants, all in casual hunting clothing, meaning heavy twill coats with the back button undone for riding, and trousers and boots that would withstand abuse far beyond that of the casual walk down a hallway. Jase, Bren had discovered early on, could wear his clothing and, their outing being on too short a notice for tailor-work, he’d contributed all his outdoor wardrobe to the adventure and packed for two.

Now, borrowed riding crops tucked beneath their arms, he and Jase walked down the steps in the middle of the company. Jago was walking with Banichi, just ahead of them, carrying the computer. Even in this event he didn’t leave it.

He wished that he’d had a chance this morning to speak with either of them at length—he wished this morning that he’d not bolted last night, though he was still unsure it wasn’t the wisest thing to have done—and now he wasn’t certain that Jago hadn’t intended to keep him busy and away from hearing and seeing whatever had gone on last night.

They’d not had a formal breakfast, and they’d had not a single hint what that noise had been last night. A lot of transport moving about. But no sign of it this morning. And as for breakfast—here in the open air came servants passing out cups and rolled sandwiches.

Bren took one, and when Jase didn’t think he wanted a sandwich, Bren nudged him in the arm. “Yes, you do.”

“They’re fish!”

“Eat it,” he said, and Jase took one and took the drink. So they had their breakfast standing there. Tea steamed and sent up clouds into the morning air all about the crowd at the foot of the steps.

Meanwhile he tried to catch Jago’s eye, but she didn’t look at him. On one level, probably not sensible, he feared he’d offended her last night by ducking out in such a hurry, or looked like a fool, or possibly he’d just amused or disappointed her.

But on another level common sense told him that the little business between himself and Jago last night hadhad no time to resolve the deeper questions between them, and that he’d been very sensible to be out the door before it became something else under what amounted to the dowager’s roof. At the very worst that might have happened, he could have gotten himself into an adventure he was neither emotionally nor personally quite sure of—and possibly she’d invited him in for the simple reason they needed to keep him away from information. Ironically that reassured him that his own security was involved in whatever was going on. To them he would commit his life without a question.

Maybe they didn’t know that.

Maybe they didn’t understand how he likedJago, that dreadful word, and was attracted, he began to admit it; and did wonder certain things which could only be resolved by trying them.

But last night hadn’t been that time.

He handed over his cup as the servants passed back through collecting them. He kept near Jase.

Fact: they had a young atevi in detention in their midst, an uncertain situation on their hands with Ilisidi, and somebody had been rummaging about the hilltop last night in motorized transport of which there was no sign nor acknowledgement.

So their lives just might be at some risk, not an uncommon situation in the last year but a situation that didn’t need the additional complication of his distraction with Jago.

He had caught Banichi for one fast question in the upstairs hall: “Is there a reason for this rush? What in hell was going on last night?” and Banichi had said, “None that I know, nothing I can say, but we’re going with the dowager, nadi: what darewe say?”

Banichi had been in an extreme hurry at the time. And Jago had been ahead of both of them. Banichi had only caught up to her in the downstairs hall and then they were out the door.

Bren looked around now counting heads. Tano and Algini hadn’t shown up yet, in the general flow of Ilisidi’s men outside. There were about twenty such men, in all, that he’d counted last night—doubtless a felicitous number, but one rarely saw all of Ilisidi’s men on any occasion: the activity of communications and guard that surrounded her was the same as that around Tabini, and the number of them was just not something either Ilisidi or her guards freely unfolded to view.

He did see that the boy from Dur had come out with them, no longer in handcuffs, just a silent presence in that foolish and very dangerous black clothing he’d chosen, and closely escorted by two guards.

Presumably, in this outing, this proposed ride out to look at the countryside and to take the air, it was necessary that young Rejiri come along with them. That was very curious.

But something had Tano and Algini notmeeting them out here, notalready outside, and that was also curious.

Possibly Banichi had given them a job to do. A message to run down to the airport or, silly thought, up to Mogari-nai, which not only had the earth station that had monitored the space station for decades; but was the major link in a web of electronic communication.

It had the earth station and also a set of dishes aimed all along the coast toward Mospheira, as Mospheira aimed a similar array toward the mainland.

It was a nerve center, his security had informed him, which was run by the Messengers’ Guild, which had not been outstandingly cooperative with him, or with Tabini.

Jase said, in a fit of depression over his father and the party and his own situation, I’d like to go to the ocean. He’dsaid to himself, foolish as he was, why not go to Geigi’s estate for a little fishing, and catch that fabled yellowtail? And maybe a little riding. The mechieti hadn’t gone back to Malguri for the summer.

So he’d gone to the dowager to see was she willing to back him up, with the notion shecould teach Jase what he’d learned—and she’dsaid, well, of course it had made sense to come to the government reserve just across the bay rather than to go to Geigi’s house asking hospitality—much more politically sound a move, Geigi could visit them here, by boat, an easy trip, the airport and van service lying just right on the water.

The hell! Bren thought to himself. He’d not appreciated the vertical scale, when Ilisidi had said the government site practically overlooked the airport.

He hadn’t truly appreciated at all how close it was to Mogari-nai, whose situation atop high bluffs overlooking the sea he didknow.

He hadn’t appreciated the involvement of Dur, either, and itsproximity to the illicit radio traffic in the north—saying that Dur was near the site was like saying Mospheira was. When you were on the coast there were islands, and nothing was that unreachably far from anywhere else if you wanted to derive trouble from it.

Hehadn’t expected the boy from Dur to show up last night.

But neither had Ilisidi—at least—if she had, she’d pretended well.

Traffic in the night—that his own security had expected, or not been overly dismayed by, so either it was routine and it waskitchen supplies coming up for some surprise banquet tomorrow, or it was something that lay within their man’chi—and thatcame down to very few items.

Knowing Ilisidi’s general penchant for intrigue, however, either they were being gotten out for the day so that the cooking aromas wouldn’t betray the surprise, or something was damn sure going on. He looked out past the crowd at a vast rolling grassland, gravelly ground with tough clumps of vegetation that grew in what might be quite a fragile ecology, up here on the ocean bluffs.

One of those national hunting reserves, to look at it. Atevi wouldn’t eat commercially produced meat. There were immense tracts where no one built, no rail crossed, no one disturbed the land.

Perimeter alarms. Electronic fences. This place.

Had they ever notified the boy’s parents, Bren asked himself, shortening his focus to the crowd ahead. Had anyonewho might worry any idea the boy was with them?

He doubted it, the way he began to be concerned that there was something specifically afoot that had taken away Tano and Algini. From the steps, a head count turned up fourteen of Ilisidi’s young men besides hissmall party.

He had brought in his luggage the gun he very illegally owned—under Treaty law that forbade the paidhi to carry a weapon, a gun that wasTabini’s gift—and Banichi’s. He hadn’t dared leave it in the apartment with uncle Tatiseigi staying there; finding that in the bureau drawer would have sent the old man through the highly ornate ceiling. But he had tucked it into his baggage for safe-keeping, knowing his luggage never had to go through a security check. He’d never believed he’d need it on this outing and now he wished he dared go back inside to get it from his luggage, not that he knew what he’d want it for, but everybody else but himself and Jase, the boy from Dur, and the dowager herself, was armed.

Wind battered them, sweeping off the sea, across heights broken not even by a fence. Jase was cold, clearly, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets. The wind whipped his hair. He looked up and scowled into the gusts with the cheerfulness with which he might gaze into an enemy’s face.

As a snort and a squall broke out from around the corner of the building.

Mechieti.

The huge, black creatures came around the corner, high-shouldered, massive in the forequarters.

Mechieti, the riding beasts that had carried atevi across the continent, that had carried them into war and on their explorations. Mechieti were vegetarian, mostly. But Jase stepped back up on the porch steps, and he thought about his own safety for the space of a heartbeat before pride made him stand his ground. They were a herd into which only their regular riders walked with assurance. Ilisidi’s men started sorting the throng out, as the riders, three in number, who had brought the herd around to the steps added to the company of Ilisidi’s men.

“You’ll have the same mechieta as last time, I think,” he said to Jase, who was glum and apprehensive of the whole affair. “Watch the nose. Remember?” Those blunt teeth on the lower jaw, the length of a human hand, could kill a man quite messily, or knock a novice stupidly flat on his back if he was fool enough to press down on the nose of an animal that regularly rooted up its food.

He counted himself still fortunate to have survived his own initial mistake with the beasts unscarred, and he had warned Jase half a year ago: those rooting tusks were blunt-capped to protect potential riders from being disemboweled in their ordinary herd behavior.

And if they fought, and this band had, a different kind of cap, war-brass, went on those tusks to make them sharp as knives.

“Nand’ paidhi.” One of Ilisidi’s young men came to the steps to take charge of Jase, specifically. “Please come with me. Follow closely.”

“Remember to keep your foot back,” Bren called after him. Some mechieti learned that feet were in reach of a bite. Jase’s mount the last time had come close to succeeding; and he never gave odds that his own twice-upon-a-time mount, Nokhada (his own, by generous gift of the dowager) would disdain such a nasty trick.

But he was excited. He had looked forward to a ride during this trip as his own enjoyment, far more than any fishing trip, and he was prepared to enjoy it if he could keep Jase from mortal injury. He was anxious to find Nokhada and renew acquaintances, and, thinking he’d spotted her, he went a little into the herd and whistled.

“Nokhada!” he called out, as riders called to their mounts. “Hada, hada, hada!”

The head turned, an eye observed, and with the surly inevitability of a landslide the neck followed, the body turned, and the whole beast moved—checked for a moment by another moving mountain.

Then, with an ill-tempered squeal that thundered against the eardrums, Nokhada didremember him and shoved her way through the others with such energy that one of Ilisidi’s men had to pull his mechieta back to avoid a fight.

Prudence might have said to go for the steps. He stood his ground and Nokhada shoved and butted him in the chest, smelled him over and then rubbed her poll against his shoulder, prompting a human who’d been laid out flat and stunned once to step to the side and jerk smartly on the single rein to get that huge, tusked, and devoted head out of the way of his face.

The head came up, which indeed would have knocked him a body-length away if not sent him to the hospital, and then as the whole herd shifted, he was in danger of being squeezed between Nokhada and Cenedi’s mount. He instantly lifted his riding crop, putting it end-on between Nokhada’s shoulder and the oncoming mass. The steel-centered, braided leather crop stood the impact and shied the two apart again: it was a trick he’d learned his last trip out, it worked; and he jerked on the long, loose rein, which had one end fastened on Nokhada’s jaw-piece and the other end slip-tied to a ring on the saddle, to get Nokhada to lower her body for a mount-up in the bawling chaos that was their setting-forth.

They were working out an agreement, he and she, or he was getting better at it. Nokhada extended a foreleg, and the other side of that getting better at itwas his speed in tugging the rein’s slipknot free of the restraining ring, getting hold of the saddle and being ready when Nokhada heaved upward with a powerful snap that pitched her rider up with the same force.

The stopping of said force allowed the rider, at apogee, to subside into the saddle if the rider had aimed himself appropriately at the seat and not to the side.

He had. Jase—was making the mount he’d made when he’d begun, being boosted up and into the saddle of a standing animal. Banichi was up; so was Jago, and the boy, last, who made a mount like Jase’s, and made a wild snatch after the rein.

At that point Nokhada made an unsignaled full about turn and used that momentary inattention to get more rein and start her way toward the front of the column.

Ilisidi was on the steps, and came down to her mechieta, Babsidi, who held sole possession of the area around him: mechiet’-aiji, herd-leader. Babsidi came to the steps, and at a genteel tap of Ilisidi’s riding crop extended a leg as Ilisidi tucked her cane into a holster made for it and stepped aboard, coordinating her step and Babsidi’s rise with a grandeur no machimi actor he had ever seen achieved. This wasa rider. This wasthe rider of this animal, for all the years of his dominance over the herd and hers over her followers. This was real; and a human found his breath stuck in his throat as Ilisidi brought Babsidi about, every other mechieta following and adjusting position, and tons of muscle moving as one creature.

Bren took tight grip on the single rein and held Nokhada hard from advancing, twisting her head as much as her long neck permitted. He pulled her full about and let her straighten out. He could see Jase, whose mechieta Jarani was one of the lower-rank mechieti, a quieter beast which wouldn’t put him to a contest for the lead and which wouldn’t lose him, either; the boy from Dur had a similarly quiet beast, so he trusted. But Cenedi’s mechieta, who was second in the herd, and Nokhada, who thought she should be, were the two principle difficulties in the whole herd. Cenedi, used to being by Ilisidi, stayed with her. But Nokhada, if ridden, would try to get next to Babs if it killed her rider. He kept a tight rein.

Jase struggled just to keep his balance. He’d been chancy half a year ago and he seemed no abler at balance in the saddle after half a year on the world’s surface. He held on with both hands; and Bren reined Nokhada in that direction, able to do so, and, he admitted it, showing off and fiercely proud of it.

Jase was not happy.

“If I die on this ride,” Jase said, “I hope you can handle the manuals.”

“You won’t die.—Foot! Watch it.”

Jase tucked it out of convenient reach of Jarani, who, frustrated in his aim, sidled over and bared teeth at Nokhada.

Nokhada ripped upward with the tusks at Jarani’s shoulder, who returned the favor half-heartedly, and for a moment there was a sort-out all around them; but Jarani gave ground and ducked and bobbed his head as mechieti would who’d just been outmuscled by one of their kind.

“Damn it!” Jase said, shaken and mistakenly trying to prevent that head movement.

Meanwhile Banichi and Jago had moved to be near both of them, theirsecurity in a cluster of Ilisidi’s young men.

“Where’s Tano and Algini?” he asked finally, having something like privacy in the squalling confusion.

“On duty,” was all Banichi said, meaning ask no further.

So presumably they were staying behind to guard the gear, or the premises, or were catching sleep in preparation for going on a round the clock alternation with Banichi and Jago.

Which sometimes happened. And from which he might take warning. All hell might break loose here before they got back—and their leaving might be a ploy to get the paidhiin to safety. They mighthave learned something from the boy that Banichi wasn’t saying.

Ilisidi started them moving, not at a walk, but at least not at a breakneck run, toward the gap in the low fence by which the vans had come in. At that moderate pace Nokhada had no difficulty reaching the front; but even with Jase and the boy from Dur trailing them there was no chance of losing them. Putting a prisoner or a guest atop an associated mechieta was the best way in the world to guarantee that individual stayed in sight and placed himself wherever the herd-status of that particular mechieta encouraged it to travel. You couldn’t leave unridden ones behind, either; they’d follow at the expense of any structure that confined them, breaking down rails or battering through gates, and injuring themselves if they couldn’t.

Man’chi. In its most primitive evocation.

At Malguri he’d seen his first primitive model of the behavior and as a human being achieved his first gut-level understanding, with Nokhada under him battling to keep up, risking life and limb—primal need that had roused enough primal fear of falling and enough personal response to that ton of desperate muscle and bone carrying him at a frantic pace that he’d had no trouble feelingthe emotional pitch. His heart still beat harder when he recalled that first chase. He’dbeen damned glad to have caught up to Ilisidi and not to have broken his neck; all through that long ride he’d been glad to catch up to Ilisidi, and he’d learned to think, gut-level, of the niche Nokhada wanted as the safest place he could be without even realizing the mechanics of what was going on in either the mechieta or in him: the mechieta going to its leader and the primate finding a safe limb, thank you, both at the same destination.

They still had some unridden mechieti with them today; but they were carrying equipment, canvas bundles.

What’s that for? he asked himself.

But he had no answer, and didn’t figure the paidhi was going to find out from his own security, not without bringing him into play, where hissecurity didn’t want him to be.

So they maintained his ignorance for his protection and Jase’s, he feared. And they held their sedate gait, good enough riders to keep Jarani and Nokhada together, by urging Jarani and getting in Nokhada’s path, while he was getting good enough at least that he wouldn’t let Nokhada have the piece of Jarani’s hide that Nokhada, by her little tensions and shiftings under his legs, wanted. The single rein always seemed to him small restraint to the mountain of an animal she was, but taps of the riding crop for some reason distracted her from mayhem, possibly because earlier in her life an ateva arm had wielded it, or just that she paid attention to her rider naturally.

And he was getting better at doing it at the precise instant it had most effect, too, which he had discovered to be right before she started to do something overt. Thatrequired a rider reading those little muscle twitches and the set of her ears and tapping her hard enough to get her attention.

Jase, however, who had ridden once, from the landing site to Taiben, was clinging with both hands to the saddle, not doing much with the rein, which was a good thing. He bumped about like a sack of laundry, and was probably annoying hell out of Jarani.

But this was the man who found a window-seat on an airplane a challenge to his sense of balance.

“Relax the spine,” he said to Jase. “You won’t fall. Relax.”

Jase tried. It was difficult for him, but he tried.

And at this speed there wasn’t a tendency for the herd to form into hierarchical order: individual mechieti dipped heads unexpectedly, snatched bits of green. Which scared Jase when it happened.

“Relax.”

Jase’s hands were, in fact, white-knuckled, and Jase’s mouth was a thin, straight line as Jarani took a snap at another mechieta moving up on them from the rear. That mechieta nipped back, and Jarani bumped Nokhada in sheer surprise.

The boy from Dur drew close, or his mechieta did: he was clearly another non-rider. He appeared to have notions what to do, but he wasn’t winning the argument; and his mechieta shied into Banichi’s, who gave it a head toss that was audible on impact.

“I’m sorry, nandi, I’m sorry.”

“Rein!” Banichi said, and the boy tried, to the inconvenience of all around him as he mis-signaled and sent the well-trained creature off to the side.

Hewas better than that, Bren thought, with perhaps too much pride; but he patted Nokhada’s hard shoulder and quietly gave Jase instruction what to do with the rein and with his feet.

And his spine. “Sit easy—easier than that,” he said. “Dammit, Jase— tryto fall off!”

Jase looked at him as if he’d misunderstood.

“Try,” he said syllable by syllable, “to fall off. You can’t. You’re balanced. Relax, dammit. Rock. Sway. Do it!”

Jase sucked in a breath and let go his death-grip on the saddle. And leaned a little one way, and then the other. And gave another deep breath.

Banichi, damn him, crooked an easy leg across the saddle front, watched the performance, and grinned.

“Better,” Banichi said. There was nothing in the entire universe that Banichi, who stood solid and square as a wall, could not do, and do gracefully. And Banichi laughed, waved his riding crop at the boy from Dur. “You listen to the paidhi, nadi. Sit like a living creature, not like a load of baggage.”

Then—then for some reason unannounced—the pace increased.

And increased, until mechieti were moving together, almost in unison, stride for stride. Bren looked back as the old fortress fell behind them.

He saw, from the angle they’d achieved in their riding away, the back of the building and vans parked there, maybe six, seven of them.

Damn, he thought. He shortened his focus to Jago riding close behind him, and knew she knew and no one was talking. They were headed upslope, now, up the general pitch of the rolling, fragile sod, on which a little brush grew, but not much, and never a tree. They were out here in an area reminiscent of riding the ridge at Malguri, climbing, and climbing.

He thought of the bluffs that overlooked the sea, and the installation of Mogari-nai that sat atop them.

He thought of the boundary out there beyond the horizon, that invisible demarcation of sea and air that marked where Mospheira began. They were moving toward it. He didn’t think by the direction they were going they’d come in view of it. But they would come close.

And the speed and smoothness with which the mechieti traveled even walking in this grassy, open land was something he’d never felt in the rough land around Malguri. It was wonderful, a traveling pace that let even Jase find his sense of the rhythm in the movement. The boy from Dur gave up holding on and rode easily in the saddle.

And slowly, inexorably, predictibly, Nokhada lengthened stride and came closer and closer to Ilisidi and Cenedi. Banichi and Jago moved with him, up through the herd.

There was never a word said. Ilisidi, a competition rider, rode with that easy grace that put them all to shame, and Babsidi’s long strides challenged all of them that followed her, reminding them that Babsidi wasquality, from his finely shaped head to his powerful rump. No one got ahead of Babsidi. And Nokhada’s joy was dampened only by the presence of Cenedi’s mechieta, her chief rival, who alwayshad a rider, an entitlement of some kind Bren had never figured out. Unridden, Nokhada hung back and caused no trouble; with him aboard, she aspired, that was all, she aspired to the front line—and made her rider feel guilty that he was so seldom there.

But he had no idea, absolutely no idea what drove her, or whether she’d been glad to see him when she recognized him after an absence or whether her fierce mechieta heart just saw justification for raising hell. He patted her shoulder. It got a flick of the ears; but no understanding of her. He said to himself he had to arrange to ride more often, somehow.

Among other dreams.

The mind could grow quiet, watching that motion, hearing the noise of mechieti at that comfortable pace all about them. Watching that horizon. Watching the shadows that had been in front of them slowly, slowly overtake them until the sun beat down on their heads.

Then Ilisidi took the group to a slower pace, and to a stop. Jase caught up to him for the first time in over an hour, and Jase had done it—had stayed on, had even, with encouragement from the riding crop and his feet and the rein, gotten Jarani to move through the crowd.

“Good for you,” Bren said as they sat on the hard-breathing mechieti. “How are you doing?”

“Alive,” Jase said, and seemed to be in pain.

Jago and Banichi moved up close. Meanwhile two of the men had slid down and were getting one of the mechieti to kneel, to let them reach the pack it carried.

“Do we go back now?” Jase asked.

“Not yet,” Banichi said; and the men hastily getting into the pack had come out with a bag of sandwiches, which they passed about, beginning with the dowager.

They ate the sandwiches, and the mechieti under them grazed the sparse vegetation, and wandered as they grazed, taking them in whatever direction or association the mechieti chose. They never got down. Canteens were an ordinary part of their equipment, and they drank. After that, the men afoot adjusted the canvas on the one pack they’d gotten into, remounted, and Ilisidi started moving again.

Not back toward the fortress, but dead ahead as they’d been bearing.

They’d started at dawn, they were going on past noon—they weren’t going to be back by dark, that became clear as they kept going.

But now that Jase failed to besiege him with questions he began to have questions of his own, no longer wherethey were going: that was, he suspected almost beyond question, eventually, Mogari-nai.

Why should they be going there? Considering the contingent of vans that had moved in behind them, coupled with Tano’s and Algini’s absence, he had a notion, too, of that answer: that Tabini-aiji was not pleased with the establishment at Mogari-nai, or the Messengers’ Guild.

Dared the aiji take on a Guild, and what would happen if he did? The Astronomers had fallen from highest of all the Guilds when they’d misinterpreted the Foreign Star, when the ship had appeared in the heavens the first time and slowly built the station. In the time when the Astronomers had predicted the future, they had entirely failed to know the nature of their universe, and they had fallen.

Possibly the Messengers had failed to know the nature of theiruniverse, and the aiji had resolved to see that his messages flowed accurately. But to take on the Messengers when the political situation was so difficult and so fraught with trouble, with Direiso urging his overthrow and Hanks and her radio broadcasting to atevi small aircraft.

Yet there it was, if he thought about it. The radio.. Another communicationsproblem: another problem that could be laid right in the Messengers’ laps. Radio traffic was a problem of which the Messengers were in charge, which Mogari-nai could have heard, especially situated where they were, near the coast.

If there were difficulty with one Guild, what other Guilds would stand by the aiji most firmly? What Guilds hadstood most firmly by the aiji? The Mathematicians—and the Assassins.

Direiso had benefit in that illicit radio. Shewould stand by the Messengers, if they were turning a blind eye to the problem.

The government had potential difficulties up here. And Banichi and Jago weren’t saying a thing.

Maybe it was Ilisidi’s orders. He had the sudden sinking feeling Ilisidi had found their vacation a fine excuse to be out here, and the paidhiin might be superfluous to her intentions to visit Mogari-nai.

Certainly Jase was.

But dammit, there were things he needed to know too. And he was going to find out, if they could just shake loose some answers.

19

It was a long, long ride at a fair clip after that. Nokhada disliked eating dust and fought to get forward, which Bren fought to prevent, not wishing to leave Jase alone, even if the spacing necessary to the mechieti for their sheer body size made conversation difficult.

That meant that the strangers to Ilisidi’s company all rode in a knot that strung out at times, but never broke entirely apart so long as Bren kept a tight rein on Nokhada, who eventually seemed to resign herself to the notion that due to some failure of ambition or temporary insanity on her rider’s part they were not going to dash forward and attempt to occupy the same space as Cenedi’s mechieta—for maybe this little while.

Ilisidi, meanwhile, ignored them to hold consultation with the armed young men who took her orders, and one or the other would fall back to the rear guard. Bren kept glancing at the horizons, asking himself what was going on. There was no recourse to the pocket coms, nothing to indicate any problem. But something had changed.

There was a wicked, angry streak in this woman, not just in a human opinion but in twospecies’ ways of looking at it. Ilisidi had been genial at the dinner last night; that was the velvet over the steel. Ilisidi was the gracious lady, the lame old woman—and the aristocrat, lord of her scaffold-supported hall. She’d arranged that crystal-laden table simply because it was difficult, and because her staff, too, did the impossible at her whim.

This morning she’d ceased to make things difficult for her staff and, astride Babsidi, whose four strong legs carried her with more speed, agility and strength than any man alive, she began to make things difficult for them. It was her way of saying to the world, he began to think, Those who follow mehave to follow at disadvantage and difficulty. It was the condition of her life. She was notaiji. But those who served her treated her wishes as if she were.

And to the powers around Tabini she said, When you who rejected meas aiji suddenly want my help, damn you all, you’ll bleed for it.

So the aiji’s security (along with the paidhiin, who were excused from the normal considerations of man’chi and courtesies due, but not from the suffering part of it) didn’t get full information from her, either: they were simply supposed to follow in blind obedience whenever fortune and chance, those devils of Tabini’s designs, put his agents temporarily under her instructions.

That was one way Bren summed it up, having seen it in operation at Malguri and again in the Padi Valley.

Or possibly it was nothing of retribution on Tabini at all.

Perhaps it was just the native style of the old-fashioned, unabashed atevi autocrat she was—as old-fashioned in some ways as the fortress of Malguri off in the east—to make them follow her only under her terms.

As if, ateva to the core, she provedthe direction not only of the man’chi of the mechieti she lent them, but that of the men she led.

Bren reasoned his way to that precarious point, while slowly stretching muscles he only used when he skied and when he rode, and bruising points of contact he onlycontacted when he rode. He’d asked for it. He’d asked for it for good reasons, but he’d forgotten how badly one could ache after a ride with Ilisidi.

There was, however, the suffering of the boy from Dur, who now rode with inexpert desperation and, being taller, leaned more, with a more committed center of gravity.

The boy from Dur fell off, and fortunately held to the harness on his way down.

The dowager kept going, as Bren reined in, as the boy’s mechieta tried to keep going, as Banichi and one of Ilisidi’s men reined in and Jago went on with Jase, who had no success stopping Janari at all: if the herd was going, Jase was going.

“Bren!” Jase called back in alarm, as if he were being kidnapped.

The boy from Dur meanwhile proved that one of atevi weight and from a standing start (or from upside down with one foot still in the bend of the mechieta’s neck and the other on the hither side of the beast, while hanging onto the saddle straps) could not leap or even crawl back into the saddle. To a likely devotee of television machimi, it was surely an embarrassment.

“I’d get off,” Banichi said dryly, as he, Bren, and Ilisidi’s man Haduni all watched from mechieta-back. “I’d make him kneel and get up from the ground.”

One suspected if anyone could dothe television trick, Banichi might, but the boy from Dur gave up his foothold on the mechieta’s neck and hopped to the ground, whereupon the mechieta decided he was through for the day and decided to wander off.

The boy was clearly mortified, took a swat with the riding crop while holding to the rein and the mechieta bolted, jerking the rein from the boy’s hand and flinging him flat.

Haduni rode after the mechieta, which was on its way to join the herd.

The boy nursed a sore palm and bowed and bowed again.

“I’m sorry, nandi. I’m very sorry.”

“Shouldn’t have hit him,” Banichi said. “That’s for running.”

“Yes, nadi.” The boy, a lord’s son, bowed, clearly in pain.

Meanwhile Haduni had caught the mechieta and brought it toward them.

Banichi tapped a strap on his mechieta’s saddle. “Hold and tuck up,” Banichi said, and that was something Bren had seen in the machimi, too. For the short distance they had to go, the boy held to the saddle strap while Banichi swung to the other side and counterbalanced, and they met Ilisidi’s man and the recovered mechieta.

Then the two men gave the boy a very quick lesson on how to get the mechieta’s attention with a tug on the rein, where to touch the crop to get it to kneel, how fast to get his foot into the stirrup, and how to use the animal’s momentum to settle on, with what tension of the rein. It was familiar stuff. And it was a good lesson, which the boy from Dur seemed to take very gratefully.

“Very much better, nandi,” Ilisidi’s man said.

“You have a chance,” was Banichi’s judgment, and they set off at a brisk clip toward the rest, who were now over the horizon of a land that didn’t look all that rolling. But it was. And the dowager, Jago, Jase, and the rest were as invisible as if they’d sunk into the sparse, gravel-set vegetation.

It wasn’t the only time they had to stop for the boy from Dur, whose mortification was complete when, at one such crisis, the mechieta led him a chase, body-length by body-length, as it grazed on the fine spring growth and the boy would almost lay hands on it only to have it move on.

There was laughter.

“Someone should help him, nadi,” Jase said, as if suggesting he should do it; but Bren shook his head. “They laugh. If they meant ill, they wouldn’t. If the boy laughed it would be graceless and impudent.”

“ Why?”

“Because, nadi, it would signal his mastery of the matter.” The mechieta eluded the boy another body-length, and the boy this time made a sprint for it. The mechieta, almost caught by surprise, bolted, and the boy went sprawling, clutching his leg. There was laughter at that, too, but fainter, and one of the men got down to see to the boy and another chased down the errant mechieta.

“Good try, boy,” the dowager said. “Bad timing.”

The boy, clearly in pain, bowed. “Thank you, nand’ dowager.” And limped over to the mechieta the man brought back for him. He properly had it kneel, had it hold the posture, the lesson of his last fall, and got on with dignity.

“Good,” Ilisidi said shortly, and Bren guessed there was—if not devotion forming in a young atevi heart, for atevi reasons: man’chi would determine that—at least a knowledge that respect could be won from her.

As good as a ribbon, that was. A badge of honor.

“Nandi,” the boy said, and bowed with a modern conservatism, not going so far as the arm-waving extravagance of the riders of such beasts on the television. He managed not to look foolish.

From Jase there was silence. If they were lucky, Bren said to himself, there was deep thought going on.

Midafternoon. There was one break for, as the atevi put it, necessity, at which they all dismounted (it was Banichi’s comment that in less civilized days they didn’t dismount at all) and went aside with two spades from the packs, men to one side of a small rise, women to the other.

“Nadi,” Jase said in a faint, unhappy voice, “I can’t do this.”

“You’ll be terribly sorry in a few hours if you don’t,” Bren said with no remorse at all, and Jase reconsidered his options and went and did what he had to do.

He came back happier. Embarrassed, but happier. They rejoined the dowager and Jago, the mechieti having waited quite happily without a boy chasing them. Babsidi came to the dowager’s whistle, and riders sorted the rest out.

The boy from Dur and Jase were the last up, but they managed on their own.

Definitely better, Bren said to himself, safe and lord of all he saw, from Nokhada’s lofty back; and Babsidi started moving, which meant Nokhada had to try to catch him.

He let Nokhada win for a while. Jase was doing well enough back there, and was not slowing them down.

At no time yet had they hit an all-out run: they had mechieti carrying the packs, and that, he began to realize, was the primary reason. But the pace they did strike ate up the ground.

They were going west. And they reached a point that the sun burned into their eyes, and still the mechieti kept that steady gait.

He had shut his eyes to save them pain from the light when a hitch in Nokhada’s rhythm warned him of change ahead, and his eyes flashed open as they topped a low roll of the land.

The horizon had shortened. The land fell away here into golden haze.

The sea stretched out in front of them hardly closer than they’d seen from the plane. Rocky hills across a wide bay were only haze. An island in blued grays rose from the golden sheet of water.

The mechieti stopped as Babsidi stopped, on the rim of the land.

“That’s Dur!” the boy said, and added meekly, in courtesy, “nand’ dowager.”

“That it is,” Ilisidi said, and signaled Babsidi to go down. She was quicker to dismount than Cenedi, snatching her cane from the loop in which she had kept it, and with a hand on Babsidi instead of the cane, waved the stick at the immediate area. “Make camp.”

“What direction are we facing?” Jase asked quietly.

“West. That’s the sun. Remember?”

Jase pointed more directly at the sun, which was slightly to their left, and near a knoll of rock and gravel that shadowed dark against the sun and broke the force of the wind. “That’s west.”

“North.” Bren signaled the direction. “We’re facing west northwest.”

“West north,” Jase said.

“West northwest.”

It wasn’t a concept Jase got easily. But Jase repeated it. “West northwest. Dur to the north and west. Mospheira west. Shejidan is tepid.”

“South. Actually southeast.”

“South,” Jase amended his pronunciation. “East. Can the mechieti go down to the sea?”

“On a road or a trail they can. Trail. Small road.” He didn’t see one at the rim, which looked sheer to his eyes. “But we’ve done enough traveling for the day. Supper. I hope.” In fact the order was going out now to make camp, and he heaved a sigh, feeling a definite soreness that was going to be hell tomorrow.

“She said sit down?” Jase had heard it too.

“Settle for the night, nadi. Camp is the word.” Talking with atevi was a constant battle to have the numbers felicitous. Talking to Jase was a continual questioning of one’s memory on what words Jase knew would carry a thought.

“We go down to the sea in the morning.”

“Nadi, remember manners. Don’t bring up the matter at supper. The dowager gives. She won’t have things demanded of her or she’ll say no. Face.”

Jase was disturbed. But he mended his manners, made his face void of thoughts, and bowed slightly. “Nadi. I shall remember. North. Northwest. South. Southeast. Is there a northeast, nadi?”

“There.” He pointed. “Taiben is in the northeast. Southwest is Onondisi Bay. This water is Nain Bay.”

“I know. It was on the map.”

Nain Bay was on the map. The sun wasn’t. And Shejidan was tepid.

One hoped, Bren said to himself, that this whole adventure would express itself only in Jase’s striking vocabulary. He hoped the night to come would be quiet, that the vans had been the caterers’, that Tano and Algini had stayed to manage the details of a welcome-home banquet—all possible—and that none of the things added up the way they might.

“Also,” he said, trying to think of everything with a man for the first time loose among the hazards of the outdoors, “nadi, be very careful of the cliff edge. Weather weakens the edge, do you understand? The earth could crumble and you could fall a long way if the edge is weak.”

“Then how do we get down?” Jase asked.

“Carefully,” Bren said. “And on a road if one exists. That’s what one does with roads.”

The packs began to come off the mechieti. Canvas bundles came down.

And sprang up rapidly as tents—spring-framed, modern tents, arising with blinding quickness.

For a woman who favored the ancient, Ilisidi certainly didn’t disdain the latest in camping gear. He knewthose atevi-scale tents. Northstar, the same brand of Mospheiran-made tenting that had served Mospheiran campers for generations, was a big export item to the mainland in atevi scale, a very, very popular export that helped Mospheira secure aluminum. The paidhi’s mind was full of such helpful eclectic data.

But a tent like this modern thing of aluminum and nylon certainly wasn’t what he expected the dowager to be using. And in hunting camouflage, not the house colors. They sprang up, arched, immediate, ground-sheeted, and pegged down with toothed lightweight pegs that went into soft ground like this like daggers into crusted bread.

“What are we going to do?” Jase asked, he thought somewhat obtusely, and he answered with a little impatience: “I suppose we’re going to have supper, nadi-ji.”

The packs gave up not only tents, but well-packed modern thermal storage, so there was no need of fire, and the mechieti, grazing, wandered off to join the mechiet’-aiji and to have Ilisidi’s men take off their harnesses.

Jason sat himself down on a hummock of grass and was examining a stem of bristle-weed as if it were of significance—and of course it was a curiosity, to him. The boy from Dur, Rejiri, had appeared to settle on Jase as a person of great interest and minimal threat and, having nothing else to do, had settled down opposite Jase, the boy talking to him rapidfire in a way that looked to have Jase engaged but confused. There was no knowing what Jase said, but Jase looked embarrassed, and the boy laughed.

But, Bren said to himself, Jase could handle himself. The boy who’d nearly bashed a plane into him wasn’t one to talk about taking offense at the paidhiin.

He could draw breath, at least, and allot concern about Jase to someone else as the sunset, beyond the picturesque spire of rock, drowned in a bank of leaden cloud.

He walked about at peace and off duty, stretching out muscle—doing nothing for bruises near the bone, but it did seem to prevent the worst stiffness. Banichi and Jago were talking with Cenedi; Ilisidi was talking to three of her young men who were about to set out the thermal containers. As a rough camp, it was a lot more grand than the night they’d spent dodging bombs in Maidingi’s hills.

And there was still nothing ominous on the horizon behind them. One could hope, maybe.

They were up here, notably, with the establishment at Mogari-nai, which had not made Tabini happy. And if they were up here to rattle the foundations of Mogari-nai and the Messengers’ Guild, that Guild was not a warlike crew. Their hostilities mostly expressed themselves in the paidhiin’s fouled-up mail.

There was also the matter of the tower up by Wiigin, and the pilots and the communications regulations. That as well as the communications fallouts he was sure was on the agenda, if they were paying an official call on Mogari-nai, and he certainly didn’t rule it out.

And if he got all that straightened out, he might possibly get another chance to make a phone call, this one with the weight of the aiji and the aiji-dowager behind him, to crack the phone system.

He wondered what had happened with his family now. No calls, he was reasonably sure, at least nothing that had gotten past Mogari-nai, through which the incoming calls from Mospheira were all routed. By the luck that dogged him in that department, there was a good chance any incoming call that Toby sent was hung up in politics. Ilisidi, if she was planning a housecleaning at Mogari-nai, couldn’t head the agenda of the aiji of Shejidan with a query from the paidhi-aiji. It just wouldn’t look right. But he might get that call through after other business was finished.

So he walked and he stretched his legs. He walked closer to the sea than he would have liked Jase to come, and he shouldn’t have done it. Jase followed him, with the boy from Dur trotting along with him, pointing out the sights, telling them there was, approximately, Wiigin, in that haze across the bay, and there was Dur, one could just see the lights in the gathering gloom, and that was the fishing port, but his father’s house at Dur-wajran, thatwas on the height of the island, which had been a fortress in the days of the first sailing ships, but the inhabitants of Saduri on the body of the mainland, with their deeply inland harbor, had attempted to take the trade, even if they’d had to dredge the bay, because of the deeper draft of modern ships.

It was all done with scarcely a breath. And Jase looked a little desperate.

“Supper,” Jago came to say, “nadiin-ji.”

They had set the tents in a semicircle, the back of each to the wind that escaped the knoll. The company settled down to a lightless supper as the dusk settled about them, and there was good hot food from the insulated containers.

There was also a wind getting up that, in Bren’s estimation, was going to make two humans glad of their jackets and the insulated tents before morning. The synthetic canvas fluttered and rippled in the wind, and the clouds flew in rags above their heads, gray in an apricot sky.

The mechieti grazed in apparent contentment. Jago had stowed the computer, little good that it was besides mental comfort, and had put it in his tent. They passed out sandwiches and had tea from instant heat containers in insulated cups.

When the dowager wantedmodernity, it attended her. Clearly so.

“So, Ja-son-paidhi,” Ilisidi said. “How do you fare?”

“Well, nand’ dowager, thank you.” Jase was on his very best behavior, and bowed with courtly grace.

“And you, son of Dur-wajran?”

“I am well, nand’ dowager. Very well.”

“And you, nand’ paidhi?”

“Curious, nand’ dowager, about your purpose here.”

“Ah.” Dark was coming down on them. “Curious. I thought you might be. What do you thinkwe’re doing out here besides pasturing the mechieti and enjoying the sea air?”

“Annoying Mogari-nai.”

He took a chance. He was relatively certain of that much.

And he amused the dowager, whose shoulders rose and fell as she leaned upon her silver-headed cane. “The earth station, they call it. This unsightly great bowl. An offense, I say.”

“A shame they put it on such a lovely view. But how else could it also watch Mospheira?”

They sat crosslegged. On ground still cold and damp with spring. And ate fish sandwiches.

“Do you think so?” Ilisidi asked, and he had the feeling that it was no casual, habitual challenge, but a question very much to the point of the hour. “Let me tell you, nadiin, before the aijiin sat in Shejidan, before humans were a suspicion in the skies, before foolish atevi had made stupid smoking machines to run on rails across the country and frighten the creatures that lived there, and before that eyesore of an earth station existed or a petal sail had dropped down to annoy us, there was war in this place. Where we sit, there was death and bloodshed.” Ilisidi held out her hand for a refill of her cup, and a young man ducked close and low to refill it. “Bones probably underlie this very hilltop. And do you know why, heir of Dur?”

“The island of Dur,” the young voice said, “was held by the heresy of the Gan, and they used to send ships up and down the coast to collect gold and grain, and they killed anybody that opposed them. They held the whole coast and they raided on Mospheira. But aijiin from several townships began to follow the aiji of Wiigin, and they raided the island and set up—set up our line.”

“Wiigin it was,” the dowager mused. And pointed a dark forefinger. “Source of this traitorous tower, this hotbed of conspiracy.”

“But now,” the young man said, “nand’ dowager, we follow the Barjidi.”

“Since the War of the Landing. That now. Two hundred years of now.”

“Since the War, nand’ dowager.” The boy had become very quiet, very wary, sensing that he was being stalked, Bren was sure, and asked himself to what end Ilisidi was proceeding.

“The petal sails came down on Mospheira,” Ilisidi recalled, “the wandering machines tore up the land and the stones of the Gan, and for a time that was convenient for Barjida-aiji, that the last stronghold of the Gan should fall to such an unforeseen threat. The grandmother stones were downed not by fleshly hands, but by these reeking machines. Machines struck down the heresy.”

“Yes,” the boy said. “And all the atevi on Mospheira left and settled on this coast.”

“Foolish politics,” Ilisidi said. “The Gan lords attempted to deal with what they thought were men descended from the moon. And it killed them. Did it not, nand’ paidhi?”

He did not want part of any quarrel, ancestral or otherwise. The atevi of the coast held just reasons for dislike of humans: many of them had moved off Mospheira to escape human contact, human ways; more had moved off when the War of the Landing had ravaged the island; the last had left when the Treaty of Mospheira had given the land to humans, the whole of a vast and once prosperous island.

“We did each other great harm, nand’ dowager.” A gust battered them.

“A good night to be under canvas,” Ilisidi said. “And a strong wind rising. But what would you tell our guest from Dur, regarding humans? Should he fear them?”

Loaded question. Very.

“Yes, nand’ dowager. At least one should remain prudent.”

“Are all humans on the island reasonable people?”

“Some are, nand’ dowager. Some are very well disposed to the peace. And I have discovered some are not.”

It was an infelicity of two, unbalanced, positive and negative. It could not be allowed to stand. It was, in its way, a question. But by inviting the posing of two, the dowager had encouraged it. Thiswas the difference between competency and fluency: thiswas the line he’d begun to cross in his off-the-cuff negotiations, the line across which humans who’d dared it had frequently blundered. Hefelt a kind of elation, aware of what he was doing as Wilson-paidhi never had figured it, aware the dowager was getting responses with which shecould know she was understood.

And with a twist of her mouth, as at some sour taste, the dowager added,

“The Kadigidi are fools.”

“I agree.”

“It lastingly troubles me that I did not shoot that woman.”

Direiso was a possibility. But he knew that womanhad one meaning to Ilisidi. “Hanks-paidhi, aiji-ma?”

“Hanks.” Definitely a sour taste. “Melon-headed, my ally, did I tell you?”

Jase had to wonder about his vocabulary.

“Lord Geigi?” Bren asked.

“One had an excellent chance to shoot Hanks-paidhi,” Cenedi interposed. “And Geigi protected her.”

“Melon-head,” Ilisidi said.

“So what didhappen, aiji-ma?” It was a point of his extreme curiosity. “One hears that there was breakage of small objects.”

“Nothing of taste,” Ilisidi said. “Oh, it was easy for Geigi to gain admittance to Direiso’s estate. Direiso had offered Geigi money to pay off a certain”—a waggle of Ilisidi’s fingers—“oil investment gone bad. Saigimi had the extreme impatience to call it due immediately. Saigimi’s wife is, you may have heard, Geigi’s cousin. And sheheld the financial note on the house at Dalaigi. She had no idea that Geigi dared come to me with the matter.” By now a smile was tugging at Ilisidi’s lips. “Silly mistake. And of course Direiso had involved herself with that detestable human woman who had embarrassed them all. Saigimi had taken her from the capital, so my sources say, and brought her to Direiso’s estate somewhat against his will.”

One hadto be aware of the lord of Dur’s son, who was sitting still as a stone. And themselves, Tabini’s for certain, when Tabini himself had not been able to discover the things Ilisidi was saying.

Ilisidi held out her cup, and more tea arrived in it.

“Well, well, and having taken her from the capital before she spoke any more such foolishness and proposed death rays coming from the station,” Ilisidi said, “he was of a notion to take her to his house in the Marid, from which she would only speak at his permission. Covering his embarrassment over the faster-than-light notion, as happened. When you were able to explain the paradox, it was clear that houses would topple, and notGeigi’s. Meanwhile Direiso had gained Hanks as her guest. She called Geigi’s cousin, Saigimi’s wife, up to her house in the Padi Hills, and things were moving very rapidly. Murini, Direiso’s heir, had gone to the Atageini— hisnerve was weakening when it came to such an outrageous provocation of the aiji; but Tatiseigi locked him in a storeroom and refused to deal with him. Tatiseigi phoned mesaying he had apprehended vermin in his cellar, meaning that he had some prisoner, of course, and was notifying me, and thatwas when that fool Saigimi shot up the lilies.”

He felt his heart beating faster and faster.

“To be rid of me?” he asked in the silence the dowager left for a sip of tea.

“The action would at one stroke have embarrassed the Atageini, whom Saigimi saw as dangerous, and if it had eliminated you, who were seen as in my grandson’s man’chi, it would have elevated the value of the human woman. They were planning an attack on nand’ Jase at the landing site, and would thus have all the paidhiin, a situation which looked quite impressive.

“At this point I approached them to contest with Direiso—as Direiso privately thought—to try to take leadership of her movement, and sent Geigi as my emissary, having myself paid his debts not an hour before.

“But the transfer of funds had not reached Saigimi, who was, of course, out of his district, being involved with the lily matter. So he didn’t know, need I say, that Geigi was free, and in mydebt, and gave no warning when Geigi showed up to see whether the way was clear for me. Silly man, he thought Geigi had come to see his cousin, who was there for, well, safe-keepingin Direiso’s care.

“It was quite a little conference. And, not wholly relying on Geigi’s inexperienced judgment, why, I showed up at the door and asked admittance before Geigi had even made his report to me. The foolish woman was distracted from the back entry. I always saidDireiso had no qualifications for high office. And shesaid she was electable as I am not. Well, well, she probably was electable, being ofthe Padi Valley and a westerner. If she didn’t look a fool.”

Now he knew why Ilisidi had spoken freely in front of the boy from Dur, who was probably terrified of hearing so much detail of conspiracy against the aiji.

Twice the national legislature had voted against Ilisidi becoming aiji in Shejidan, the story was, because she was believed apt to take bloody revenge on enemies inthe legislature; twice that he knewof, now, Ilisidi had been involved in conspiracy that might have led to Tabini’s overthrow, and this time had made a thorough fool of Direiso. If she had ever admitted what she had said in others’ hearing, his security hadn’t reported it and Tabini had professed to him not to know.

As Tabini might notknow. Ilisidi would delight in putting Tabini in a place where he had to rely on her simply because maneuvering the aiji of Shejidan into such a position exercised muscles and gave the dowager pleasure, damned if not. The plague of my life, Tabini called her; and never, that he knew, nevermade a move against his grandmother.

“Dowager-ji,” he said softly, “you areamazing.”

“Ah, but I should have shot that woman.”

“As seems now,” Cenedi said, “but then—who knew what would come from the sky?”

Hedging her bets against the ship keeping its word. Cenedi hadn’t revealed that, either, without the dowager’s implied permission, but far fewer in this company would understand it in all its meaning.

“One needs ultimately,” Ilisidi said, “to draw all these elements together. But this distasteful human woman, one takes it, withthe help of the Presidentof Mospheira, is continuing her meddling. She knew contacts. She knew where to send such messages to have them fall on willing ears. She evidently gathered such information quite freely while she was dealing with Saigimi—whose demise was timely. I dare say, timely.”

What does thatmean? he wondered in some distress, but consciously didn’t frown.

The rags of cloud had flown over them. There was thunder, definitely, in the distance. The sky flickered over their heads, reminding one of metal tent frames and their situation at the crest of the promontory—save the knoll behind the tents.

“It was well done,” Ilisidi said, and chuckled softly. “So was Badissuni’s indigestion.”

“Nand’ dowager,” Jago said as if she had received a compliment.

He at least had suspected. He wasat least keeping up with situations. Badissuni might have joined Direiso in her adventurism in the north. Badissuni was in the hospital—but alive—and Ajresi still had Badissuni to worry about, so hewas out of the game.

“Time for bed,” Ilisidi said, and the woman who used a cane to get about and who had complained for years that she was dying used it now to lever herself up with smoother grace than a much younger human whose muscles had stiffened from sitting on the ground. “Early to rise,” the dowager proclaimed, looked up, and smiled at the lightning. “Lovely weather. A new year. Springon the coast.”

20

What was she saying?” Jase asked in a whisper as they went toward the tent. Jase caught his arm. “What was going on?”

“A little information,” Bren said. Thunder rumbled above them, and he could feel Jase flinch. He saw Banichi and Jago in converse a little distance away, and guessed that they had heard detail they had never heard, the same as he had. “Banichi and Jago killed lord Saigimi,” he said to Jase, “at Tabini’s order. But the dowager said she took Deana Hanks away from Direiso when Direiso kidnapped her last year. That dispute was what you parachuted into.”

“Factions.” Jase knew that word.

“Factions. She’s saying that Saigimi’s wife was trying to get lord Geigi’s land and title, and she prevented it. So Geigi helped herget Deana away from lady Direiso. Tabini let Deana go. Now Deana’s behind some radio broadcasts to Direiso’s followers, talking against Tabini. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, sometime during our trip, we don’t go up to Mogari-nai and express the aiji’s andthe dowager’s discontent with them losing our mail and not acting aggressively to prevent those broadcasts. That’s a huge electronics installation. If it’s letting some little handheld radio communicate with the mainland—” Thunder cracked and Jase jumped, his face stark and scared in the lightning flash. “—it’s not doing its job very well.”

“Will they shoot?”

“Mogari-nai? No. That’s not their job. The Messengers’ Guild holds Mogari-nai. The Assassins’ Guild is with Tabini. Open conflict isn’t going to benefit the Messengers’ Guild, I can tell you that. Better get inside.” He’d seen Banichi leave the brief conversation and go out into the dark, possibly for nothing more than call of nature; but he wasn’t sure. “I’ll be there in a minute. Don’t worry about the thunder. Lightning’s the threat. But it hits the tallest thing around. Keep lower than the tent roof and you’re fine.”

It wasn’t true. But the mechieti were in more danger.

“Where are you going?”

“To talk to our security, nadi. Go inside. Don’t worry about it.” Wind was battering them, ruffling and snapping the canvas. A fat, cold drop splashed down on him as he went to that endmost tent.

Jago had seen him coming. She waited for him in the pelting early drops of rain.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, fearful, despite the assurances he’d given Jase, that there might be more going on than he knew about.

“Yes,” Jago said, and caught his arm, pulling him toward the inside of the tent. “Come in out of the rain, Bren-ji.”

It was their tent. Hers and Banichi’s, compact for atevi, affording her no room to stand. It was warmer, instantly. Softer than the ground, insulated by an inflated bottom fabric. Black as night. He couldn’t see a thing. Possibly she could.

“You did very well,” Jago said in a hushed tone. “You did verywell, Bren-ji.”

“One hoped,” he said.

“She wished to say such things in the boy’s hearing, and you afforded her the audience she needed. You asked about Deana’s kidnapping. Did it occur to you to ask about your own?”

The thought had crossed the depths of his mind, while Ilisidi was confessing to things Tabini’s security had worked hard to learn. “I feared it might divert us. I take it that it isa second matter.”

Lightning showed her shadow against the dim fabric of the tent. Something hard and dangerous and metal met his hand. His hand closed on a pistol grip. “This is yours, Bren-ji. I took it from your luggage. Keep it inside your coat.”

His heart was beating fast enough to get his attention now. “Are we in such danger?”

“Do you remember the getting of this gun?”

“Tabini gave it to me.”

“No. Banichigave it to you.”

It was true. He couldn’t tell one from the other. On holiday at Taiben, he and Tabini had shot at melons and broken Treaty law—before he’d ever met Ilisidi.

Tabini had given him a gun he shouldn’t have, by Treaty law; and he’d been anxious when he returned to Shejidan. He’d not known what to do with it in his little garden apartment, with two servants who were not—he understood such things far better now—reliably within his man’chi. He’d tucked it beneath his mattress.

He’d fired it at an intruder that had appeared at his curtained door, in lightning flashes, on such a night as this.

Banichi and Jago had replaced his security that night. Banichi had replaced the gun—in case, Banichi had said, an investigation should link it to Tabini.

Banichi and Jago had taken over his apartment, wired his door, replaced his servants, and brought in Tano and Algini, whom at that time he hadn’t trusted.

From that hour forward he’d been in Jago’s and Banichi’s care.

And immediately Tabini had sent him, with Banichi and Jago, to Malguri, to Ilisidi’s venue.

He’d been in danger of his life. He believed that then. He believed it now, sitting in this tent with Banichi’s gun tucked into his jacket.

And he went back to the simplest, most ground-level question he had used to ask them: he, the paidhi, the expert. “What should I know, Jago-ji?”

“That in the matter of Deana Hanks, Ilisidi did very well, and has only credit. But the night the intruder came to your bedroom, one of her faction had exceeded orders and attempted to remove you. We did find out not the name but the man’chi. And that you, yourself, bloodied this reckless person; that was a profound embarrassment to the dowager. She had refused Tabini’s offer to negotiate until that happened and until, against her expectations, Tabini declined to expose the author of the attack and asked again for her to accept you in trust. But before he sent you to Malguri, he filed Intent against persons unnamed, which was a gesture toward the Guild, which caused the Guild to take official notice and regularize the paidhi’s rank within Guild regulations. And thatmade illegal any second move against the paidhiin. It was coincidentally a situation which complicated his dealing with Deana Hanks when she arrived in the capital while you were absent at Malguri.

“Meanwhile Ilisidi was trying to determine whether she would believe Tabini’s urgings that neither he nor humans had betrayed the association—or whether she could agree to lead an attempt to remove Tabini from office. Some eastern conspirators believed her assessment that you were honest—and some were convinced by questioning you.”

“Was thatwhat that was?”

“The matter in the cellars? Yes. We could notprevent it. The rebellion was going forward. A certain lord moved without the dowager, attempting to overthrow her, and she brought down Tabini’s forces on their heads. Here, in the west, however, the situation was exactly as you apprehend: there was a fear ofhumans, and once that was allayed—Tabini was more popular than before with the commons, as was the prospect of even closer cooperation between humans and Shejidan, a deluge of technology from the heavens, and more centralized power to Shejidan. Direiso and others who want to sit in Tabini’s place, and the peninsular lords who don’t want a centralized government, all saw that if they didn’t move soon, they’d never dare. So they approached Ilisidi in the theory she might have been coerced into returning you. And Ilisidi acted to rescue the paidhiin and keep them out of Direiso’s hands. That much was clear. Ilisidi does not want Direiso as aiji. But where does Ilisidi herself stand? The answer, nadi-ji, was out there tonight. I suspect Saigimi, from the peninsula, attempted to get Ilisidi to overthrow Direiso—who isfrom the Padi Valley, as Ilisidi is from the remote east.”

“Can we rely on her? It pains me even to ask, Jago-ji, but dare we rely on her? Or is there some thirdchoice?”

There was silence out of the dark. Lighting showed him Jago, elbow on knee, fist on chin. And a break of that pose in that flicker of an instant.

“The aiji tested herby sending you to her at Malguri. Now she tests himby demanding both paidhiin in her hands. Thatis where we sit tonight, Bren-ji. And we don’t knowthe answer.”

“I asked her to bring us here.”

“Not as Cenedi told me the story.”

It was not, he recalled now, accurate. “I asked her to go with us to Geigi’s house.”

“And she then suggested Saduri.”

“She did.”

“And Geigi had invited you to his house.”

“He did. He had.”

“Geigi is within her man’chi, Bren-ji. Tabini’s maneuvering helped him pay his debt to Ilisidi. But she had already rescued him financially. However—you—whom the dowager favors—and who have man’chi to Tabini, as you have stated, saved his reputation. Geigi is in an interesting three-way position.”

One of the things that humans had done most amiss in the days before the War was to make what they thought were friendships across lines of association that could not otherwise be associated: they’d ripped atevi society to shreds and killed people and ruined lives, never realizing what they’d done.

“Damn,” he said, with a very sick feeling; but with a little inaccuracy in the dark, Jago touched his hand.

“This is not necessarily bad, Bren-ji.”

“It was damned foolish on my part.”

“Ah, but not necessarily bad. Once youwished her to come to Dalaigi, which Tabini’s actions against Saigimi had made unwise—she was free to suggest Taiben. Which Tabini expected. But she wished you to go to Saduri, and now we know why: Deana Hanks is coming to the mainland and the aiji-dowager already knew it.”

“To the mainland!”

“We don’t know how. Boat or small plane. It could be anywhere on the coast.”

“ Why, nadi-ji?”

“One would ask the paidhi thatquestion. But this information is since last night, Bren-ji. Tabini didn’t know, and Ilisidi may yet know more than we do.”

“To ally with Direiso. A second establishment—to challenge Tabini’s government. That’s what Deana’s up to. God! But where’s Ilisidi in this?”

“With the aiji. We hope.”

He had recently realized there were new players in the game. Dangerous ones. He recalled the controversy with the pilots forming a Guild. The opposition of the Messengers. “And the Messengers’ Guild? The Guilds in general?”

“The Guilds in general stand with the aiji. We expressed that fact in the Marid, when we carried out our commission. Meanwhile Hanks is coming to the mainland for reasons we don’t know; but we do know that Direiso has not yet explained to her that she has much less support than previously. NowHanks is an asset which Direiso musthave to demonstrate to her wavering followers that she has the resources to deal with Mospheira; and we think that is exactly what she intends. Mospheira seems weak, lacking in resources—its ship will not fly in advance of ours. And could Direiso secure her own position by dealing with Mospheira, she would do so. That she dislikes humans would only make it sweeter to her.”

“That Hanks’ faction dislikes atevi wouldn’t stop them, either. She’s coming here to make a deal for resources Mospheira can’t get without those rail lines and the northern shipping ports. Where Direiso is strong right now.”

“It would accord well with our suspicions.”

“ Durwouldn’t support this—would it?”

“The boy? Completely innocent. And aware of far more than young ears should hear. His father wished to keep the island out of difficulty, I suspect. Or told the boy that wiser heads would settle it. Dur is not reckless. It’s an island that used to live by smuggling and now wants tourism. They’re far too small to matter in most accounts. But the boy—is a boy. He stole the plane, and with a map six years out of date, he flew out of Dur at night and followed the railroads to Shejidan, which brought him over the rail terminal. And right across your approach route.”

Rain suddenly hit, rattling hard on the canvas.

On the edge of that downpour a shadow appeared in the doorway. Bren’s heart jumped.

“Nadiin.” Banichi squeezed into the dark, dripping wet. “Have you explained everything, Jago-ji? Made clear the universe?”

“Almost,” Jago said. “And given him the gun. Which you will use, Bren-ji, at your discretion.”

“I hope not to need it.”

“Traceable only to me,” Banichi said. “But such details matter very little in the scope of this situation.”

“How did she get me to ask her to come here?” He still struggled with that thought. “Am I so transparent?”

“Immaterial that you asked her. One believes the aiji would have packed you up and sent you, all the same,” Jago said. “She didn’t needyou to ask her. She came back to Shejidan to get you. The party was the excuse. She was feeling out Tabini, feeling out your position—and observing Jase.”

He had a sinking feeling. “Tatiseigi. Where is hein this?”

“Ah,” Banichi said. “Uncle Tatiseigi. Bets are being laid. Very high ones.”

Thinking what he’d been meddling with, in that crazed business with the blown lightbulb, he felt cold all the way to the pit of his stomach.

“You still don’t know where he is in this.”

“Bren-ji,” Jago said quietly, “Saigimi didn’t know where hewas. Even we make mistakes of man’chi. It is not always logical.”

“And he can’t find the television set,” Banichi said somberly. “One hopes.”

He laughed. He had to laugh.

“I shall sleep with Jase,” Banichi said. “Just—be prudent, nadiin. Keep the noise low.”

“Banichi,” he began to say. But it was too late. Banichi was out the door into the rain, headed for his tent, hisroommate, and leaving him nowhere else to be for the night.

He was in the dark. In utter silence. And there might be more briefing for Jago to do. “So what else is there to ask?” he inquired of her.

“I’ve said all I can, Bren-ji.”

A silence ensued.

“We should rest,” Jago said.

“Jago,” he began, and had to clear his throat.

“One is not obliged, nadi-ji. Banichi has a vile sense of humor.”

“Jago—” He reached for her hand in the dark, found what he thought was her knee, instead, and knew how he’d possibly rejected her and embarrassed her, last night, after what seemed a set-up. He didn’t know, that was the eternal difficulty, even what signals he sent now, and he thought about her, he thought about her in his unguarded moments in ways that made this touch in the dark the most desirable and the most reprehensible thing he could do.

Her hand found his with far more accuracy, and rested atop his, warm and strong and its gentle movement occupying all the circuits he was trying to use to frame an objection of common sense.

“Jago,” he began again, and Jago’s hand slid across to hisknee. “I’m really not sure this is a good idea.”

And stopped.

To his vast distress. And disappointment. But he was able then to find her hand and hold it. “Jago,” he said for the third time. “Jago-ji. I am concerned—” Her fingers curled about his thumb, completely throwing his logic off course. “Propriety,” he managed to say. “Banichi. The dowager. I want you, but—”

“She is outside your man’chi. Not far. But outside. And it’s safer, tonight, if you’re here and Banichi is with Jase, if anything untoward should happen.”

“What might happen?”

“Anything. Anything might happen. Whatever pleases you. I would be inclined to please both of us.”

He could feel the warmth from her. The lightning showed him her shadow, close to him. “Then should we—” he began, in the glimmer of a self-protective thought.

“We should be careful of the guns,” she said with what he was sure was humor, and her fingers searched the front of his jacket.

He felt a rush of warmth, shifted position and took hold of her to defend himself from her exploration in search of the firearm. “Is this a good idea?” he asked, reason sinking fast. “Jago-ji, if you do that, we may both scandalize the company.”

“Not this company,” she said, and somehow they were past each other’s defenses and he was no longer thinking with complete clarity of purpose, just exploring a territory he’d not seen and didn’t see, alone and not alone for the first time in his life. She was doing the same with him, finding sensitive spots, and presenting others he might have missed. Clothes went, on the somewhat bouncy and thin mattress—“We have to look presentable,” was Jago’s prudent warning, and with clothing laid carefully to the side, caution went. He moved his hand along smooth expanses in the darkness, to curves that began to make sense to his hands, as her hands were traveling lightly over him, searching for reactions, finding them.

God! Finding them. He brought his hands up in the shock of common sense that said danger, harm, pain—and at that moment Jago’s mouth found his and began a kiss both explorative and incredibly sensual.

He had never known atevi did that. She tastedforeign; that was odd; but matters now reached a point of no-thought and no-sense. They were in the dark, neither knowing in the least what hurt and what didn’t, but efforts to consummate what was underway began to be a rapid and frustrating comedy of errors that at first frustrated and embarrassed him and finally started her laughing.

Her good humor made him less desperate. “We have to practice this in daylight,” he muttered. “This is exhausting.”

It won a finger poke in the ribs, which she’d discovered got a protective reaction. He curled up—and at a thunder boom, jumped against her and held on. They were, he thought, both out of their minds, in a tent, halfway to the lightning-laced heavens, under a metal frame, and in earshot of Ilisidi’s men. Then—then, maybe it was the plain admission he was being a fool, or maybe it was Jago’s changing position—a sudden and by no means coordinated reaction sent him toward release. She shivered oddly and didn’t complain; and his eyes shut and the dark went darker and red and black.

For a moment or two then he just drifted in space, half aware of the warm body wrapped around his, tasting the strange taste that was Jago, and feeling, well, that he’d managed enough. She seemed to have found something enjoyable out of it, and he was appalled at the thought she’d tell Banichi and make a funny story of their night.

Which it was, dammit. She was right to laugh. Thank God she could laugh. It made it all less serious, what he’d gotten into, and he tried to set it in perspective as they lay together with the lightning turning the walls transparent. She was curious; he’d answered her question. She’d surprised the hell out of him about the kiss—he felt warm even thinking about it—and he wondered whether she’d done a little research of her own or whether atevi just did that.

And she hadn’t given up on the night. Bad trouble, he said to himself, as Jago’s fingers wound curls in his hair, as she fitted her body against his just for comfort and seemed satisfied. In that moment his human feelings slid right over the edge of a cliff more dangerous than the one outside. She brought him no recriminations, found no fault—maybe had an agenda—but this was the woman he’d trust for anything, and whose good will he wouldn’t risk for anything.

Evidently, by those fingers making curls out of his hair, he still had her good regard. He’d risked everything and hadn’t lost, and there might be other nights, when he’d thought he’d reached a safe numbness to his personal affairs. Oh, God, it was dangerous.

“Was it pleasant?” she asked him.

He drew a breath. “I enjoyed it.”

“It was not very responsible of us. But Banichi knew we would do it.”

“ Didhe?” he asked, but he was sure of that, too.

“Of course. But we should get dressed, in case. There was no danger early on. But toward morning we should be a little on our guard, in case we must move.”

“Direiso?”

“Possibly.”

“What’s going on? Whereare we going and what are we up to?”

“Cenedi and the dowager know that for certain. But Mogari-nai, most likely. Which Direiso-daja will not like.” She unwound herself upward and tugged on his hand.

Will not like? he asked himself. Getting to his feet, he agreed with. But she ducked out of the tent stark naked into driving rain and pulled him out with her. It was cold rain. They were standing in water. Lightning was still going on, the wind was still fierce and Jago, her black skin glistening in the lightning, sluiced over by the rain, and her braid streaming water, acted as if she were in the safe, warm showers at home.

He followed her example, unwilling to think himself more delicate than she was. He scrubbed and rubbed and was oh so glad she ducked back inside in a hurry. She flung his insulated sleeping bag at him for a towel, and they both cleaned up and dressed and snuggled down with one of the open bags beneath them and one zipped out flat above them, both shivering and holding on to each other.

“Better than a roof in the peninsula,” she said, and hugged him close. “Get some sleep.”

He tried. He didn’t think he could, after the shock of cold water; but the shivering stopped, her warmth was comfortable, her embrace was trustable as anything on earth, and he found himself drifting.

Not love, he said to himself. And then thought, with one of those flashes of insight his professional mind sometimes had, maybe they’d had such rotten luck with the love and man’chi aspect of relations because that word in Mosphei’ blurred so many things together it just wasn’t safe to deal with.

They were lovers. But Ragi said they were sexual partners.

They were lovers. But Ragi said they were associated.

They were lovers. But Ragi said they were within the same lord’s man’chi.

They’d made love. But Ragi said there were one-candle nights and two-candle nights and there were relationships that didn’t count the candles at all.

They’d made love. But a Ragi proverb said one candle didn’t promise breakfast.

He and Jago would be lucky to have a breakfast undisturbed by the trouble that might come tomorrow, but he’d know his back was protected, come what might, by her andBanichi. So if their languages didn’t say quite the same thing and their bodies didn’t quite match and the niches they made that said this person satisfies enough requirements to make me happywere just a little different-shaped in their psyches, the center of that design might match, leaving just the edges hanging off.

But didn’t his relationship with Barb have unmatched edges? Didn’t every close relationship?

He was quite out of his depth in trying to reckon that. But with Jago he certainly wouldn’t count the candles. Whatever they could arrange, as long as it could last from both sides, that was what he’d take.

He was happy, right now, where he was. He didn’t swear it would bear the light of the sun. He didn’t let himself hope—the way things in his personal life that had looked as if they were going to work had tended not to—that it would stand the sun.

But he trusted that Jago would protect herself.

That thought let him relax, finally, listening to her breathing. In dim-brained curiosity he began timing his breaths to hers and seeing if they could be brought to match. He could force it—but it wasn’t quite natural. She seemed asleep, so that might not be a fair test.

He went on trying to make a match, but it eluded him.

21

Good night?” Banichi asked them, in the cold, rainy dawn, when Ilisidi’s men were off to saddle the mechieti.

“Quite good,” Jago declared with a tilt of her head. “For the curious, yes, Banichi-ji, and you’ll go begging for the salacious details.”

Bren tried to keep an expressionless face as Banichi glanced at him for information. And didn’t think he succeeded.

“Shut out,” Banichi said. “Abandoned.”

“Fled,” Jago said. “Having set the scene.”

“ Shewas the one who said we needed to set separate guard last night,” Banichi said. “But I heard no appeals for rescue.”

“Be decent!” Jago said, finally rising to the defense. “My partner has no shame, paidhi-ji.”

Banichi strolled off quite happily, while the servants hastily struck tents. Ilisidi and Cenedi had gone out to get the mechieti; until Babsidi came to his rider, no other would. The boy from Dur had found Jase and was tagging him on a course toward them.

Jase was limping: it needed no guess to say why, in a beginning rider. Jase looked worried. Likely he was going to ask why they’d been separated last night.

And he didn’t know how he was going to explain it. The truth was going to have repercussions. There was no way it wouldn’t.

“I have duties,” Jago said, and deserted him.

“Bren?” Jase said.

“Good morning, Jasi-ji. Sorry about the change of arrangements last night.”

“The rain. I know.” Jase rushed past that item. “Where are we going? nand’ Rejiri says west. West, am I right, nadi? Mogari-nai? Not fishing. Not down to the sea?”

The boy from Dur looked as if a glimmering had reached him that he had just possibly said something out of line. And Bren tried to recall what he’d told Jase on the other side of a mountain of new information.

“You promised me the ocean,” Jase reminded him, “nadi. We were going to go fishing. You said political problems at Mogari-nai. Nand’ Rejiri says his father should bring guns there and I should ask you to ask the dowager if he can go to his father and bring guns.”

“Ask the dowager,” Bren said to the boy, “nadi.”

“One has asked, nand’ paidhi. But she won’t rely on me.”

“Possibly she has other reasons, nadi, such as intentions she holds in secret, and I would suggest that you remember she is old because some of her enemies are dead.”

Rejiri’s face grew quite sober. “Nandi,” he said.

While an aggrieved roommate with a good deal more than that on his mind waited to have hisquestion answered.

“Jase,” Bren said, “we are going to Mogari-nai, and I am increasingly certain we have a difficulty.”

“We are not on vacation.”

“I do not think we are on vacation, no, Jase.”

“Where were you last night?”

The boy was there, all ears.

“Talking,” Bren said.

“But not to me,” Jase said, and walked off.

“Jase!” he said, but Jase kept walking down what had been a line of tents and now was a set of bundles of baggage.

He couldn’t run after after Jase in front of the whole camp. He couldn’t start a quarrel. Jase was nota diplomat. He didn’t know how far it would go, or where it would end if Jase blew up, and blew up at the wrong people.

Meanwhile Ilisidi was up on Babsidi and she and Cenedi were bringing the herd in to the place where the gear waited.

“I suppose I talked too much, nand’ paidhi,” Rejiri said shamefacedly.

He’d never dealt individually with atevi youngsters. Certainly not with a boy verging on independence.

And he had no wish to humiliate the boy, who had probably heard his faults enumerated by Banichi. “Did nand’ Banichi give you advice?” he asked.

“Yes, nand’ paidhi.”

“Was it good advice?”

There was a moment of silence. “Yes, nand’ paidhi.”

“He’s a wise man,” Bren said. “I take advice from him, frequently. Even the aiji does. I’d watch himand do what he does.”

He wasn’t thinking about the boy. He was thinking about Jase, and how to patch his own mistakes, and maybe it was a little revenge for Banichi’s jokes to aim the innocent in his direction. But the boy said, enthusiastically,

“ Thankyou, nand’ paidhi,” and set off in Banichi’s direction.

He wondered what he’d just done; and then it struck him that Ilisidi and all her men were eastern, and he and Jase were the only officials here whose man’chi was really clearly Tabini’s. He’d just confirmed to the confused lad that, indeed, he could rely on Banichi, and recommended he do so.

At least it was the truth, and he hadn’t misled the boy or done any harm to the situation.

If he could only be so lucky with his own species.

Jase didn’t look at him as he walked up. The camp was a snarling confusion as the dowager’s men saddled the mechieti.

“Well, well, well,” Ilisidi said cheerfully, as Babsidi moved up to tower against the gray-ribboned sky, “good morning, nand’ paidhi.”

Was she upset? Bren asked himself. Did she know?

Ilisidi knew every sneeze in her vicinity. And that courtship game they’d played, he and Ilisidi. Did it mask real possessiveness? An old woman’s real inclinations?

Disaster?

“You inspire so manyquestions,” Ilisidi said from her height of vantage, and signaled Babsidi to go past him. Nokhada was saddled. So was Jase’s mechieta, and there was no place to talk, no timeto talk with the mechieti waiting for riders and the men who were doing the saddling wanting to get riders up and out of their way.

He made Nokhada bend down for him, got himself up with that unique pain of the second day in the saddle. Jase was no better, he was well certain. He was sure the only ones immune were Ilisidi and her men.

He kept Nokhada under tight rein and knew he wasn’t going to have a chance to talk to Jase in anything like the length and complexity of topic that could calm Jase down.

Jase knew he’d been lied to. Not by intent, maybe, but he deserved Jase’s anger at being left literally in the dark last night. Banichi would be good-humored and a quiet bedfellow, veryquiet, meaning Jase would not have gotten any information out of him. He’d indicated he’d come back. Lie number one.

He’d not told Jase where he’d been. Lie number two, at least by omission, and he hadn’t remotely thoughtabout Jase’s state of mind in terms of anything but the storm and the lightning he knew Jase feared, Banichi wasn’talways good at reassuring a man, Banichi and his jokes. Banichi had probably given him the statistics on people hit by lightning on camping trips.

He had to get his wits together. He couldn’t treat Jase that way. He was solidly in the wrong this time, because he’d been distracted by personal affairs, and it was just too damn serious a matter to say I forgot.

The last of the company mounted up. The sea was a misty gray beyond the cliffs. The island of Dur showed indistinct in a morning haze.

Ilisidi kept it on her right as she led off at a fast clip. They were headed west. And they clearly weren’t going fishing.

The clouds kept blowing overhead from some inexhaustible source beyond the horizon, wave after wave driven by stiff winds aloft; but the sun began to win the battle toward midmorning, and light and shadow played on the velvet-textured rolls of the land.

Beautiful. A distracted mind couldn’t but notice.

Bren said as much to Jase as they rode, trying to set up a friendlier mood for the rest stop he knew was coming, when he hoped to have a chance to talk.

“Yes,” Jase said; but nothing more, and when they did get their stop, and did get down, Jase listened to his “I’m sorry,” and said, “Where is the truth, nadi? How do I tell the truth?”

“I was with Jago,” he said in the lowest voice that would carry. “I’m sorry! I wasn’t thinking! I was stupid! Will you listento me?”

“Go ahead.” They weren’t that far from Banichi. But that meant they weren’t far from the boy from Dur, who’d attached himself exactly as he’d said. And Jase’s tone didn’t invite confidences.

“There’s a rumor Deana Hanks is coming to the mainland. I suspect Mospheira is going to try an independent deal with Direiso of the Kadigidi to peel the northern provinces outof the Western Association, but I’m not sure I can make atevi see entirely what Hanks thinks she’s doing: it’s too foreign to their instincts. The whole east is shaky, held mostly by Ilisidi’s influence. Do you follow me?”

“Is that what you discussed in bed?”

“ Yes, dammit, among other things. Listen to me. We’ve got a problem a hell of a lot larger than my mistake. I admitit was a mistake, all right, I was a damn fool, but I was trying to find out the situation last night—”

“Among other things.”

“Yes, among other things.” He was getting madder. He was so mad already his muscles were shaking, and his breath was short, and it didn’t help communication. He shifted to Mosphei’. “Can you for God’s sake quit keeping score on who’s wrong and who’s right and hear what I’m saying?”

“I do hear what you’re saying. If you’re not lying one moretime, what are we doing out here in the middle of it? Why did they bring us here, if this was going on? Can you answer that?”

“I’m trying to!”

“What does it take? More research?”

“Use your head, dammit! This is serious.”

“I don’t take it for anything else. Where are Tano and Algini? Why are we suddenly with thesetwo? Bren, give me an answer!”

The dowager was getting back in the saddle. They had to follow or it was certain the mechieti would go and leave them stranded.

“I assure you they’re all right,” Bren said. “They’re working back at the fortress, securing the area.”

“Easy answer.”

“These are partners of theirs!” The man assigned to help Jase up was waiting. They were almost the last.

“Consider man’chi. Consider everything I’ve told you. Banichi and Jago aren’t going to see anything happen to them.”

“Meaning you don’t knowwhy they didn’t come.”

Question begot question begot question. “I can’t argue with you. We haveto go.” He went to Nokhada, so charged with temper he hardly felt the effort it took for bruised muscles to catapult him into the saddle. He reined about to be sure Jase made it as the man boosted Jase up, then assisted the boy from Dur into the saddle.

Jase didn’t understand him. Given professional experience, he ought to be able to achieve an understanding with Jase with far less trouble than he had with atevi; and it didn’t work that way. It hadn’t worked that way all year.

Why are we withthese two? Stupid question, ignoring everything he’d said.

But Tano and Algini had been there while Jase was in the apartment, and Banichi and Jago hadn’t been there for a long while. Tano and Algini were the reliable figures in the household that Jase knew of, the ones hewould go to; so from Jase’s viewpoint there was attachment quite as valid as his—admitted—attachment to Banichi and Jago.

In that reassessment of Jase’s obstinacy he rode Nokhada near him, hoping that he would choose to talk; but Jase said nothing to him nor seemed to care he was there. Jase sometimes rode with his eyes shut, maybe ignoring the pitch and heave of the land, maybe motion sick: he had complained of it a great deal when he’d first come down.

“Pretty clouds,” Bren said.

No answer.

“This whole land tilts,” Bren said. “There aren’t that many roads. The fortress watches the slope up off the plains. If it weren’t there, someone could drive up undetected. They’re back there to warn us. That’s what they’re doing.” It dawned on him then in cooler temper that a man who had trouble with a flat surface wouldn’t intuitively grasp warfare and its tactics. “Like the foyer at home. Stand in that door and nobody can come in. Just like them staying in the foyer office. As long as they’re there, nobody can come up on this land. And Tano and Algini might do that if we wereout here on vacation. The aijiin never assume no one’s after them. Ever.”

Jase didn’t answer. But Jase did at least look at him.

“Four, five hundred years ago,” Bren said, “before humans on this planet, atevi rode mechieti to war.” He pointed to the rolling land ahead of them. “Five hundred riders could be just up there, close as the gardens to the apartment. You couldn’t see them. That’s why men keep riding ahead of the dowager. Ordinarily the mechieti don’t like to do that—get ahead of the leader. But they do it for short rides out and back, looking to see the way is clear.”

Jase waslistening. He caught the quick and worried glance at the horizons, and saw Jase’s whole body come to a different state of tension. In that distracted moment Jase suddenly synched with the mechieta’s moving and seemed to feel it.

“That’s how you oughtto ride,” Bren said, “Jase.”

Jase looked at him, lost his centering and found it again; and lost it.

The fact Jase hadsomehow coped with being out here didn’t mean Jase knew a thing, Bren thought, not about the mechieti, not about the concept of land, or tactics, or how to stay on or how to protect himself if someone did come up on them and mechieti reacted as mechieti would do. Politics and language and living in an apartment was what he’d taught Jase. It was allhe’d taught Jase.

“If the mechieti have to run,” he said, “—in case they do.” He changed languages and went rapid-fire. “The atevi riders stay on by balance. Youjust hunch down tight and low and hold to the saddle. It won’t come off. Get as low as you can. If they canjump something they will; otherwise they can turn very fast, and if you’re not low you’ll fall off. Join his center of mass. All right? If he jumps, his head will come back, and if your face is too far forward he can knock you cold. If they jump, center your weight, lean forward, head down while he’s rising, lean back while he’s landing and duck down again. We’re small. Nothing we do affects them as much as an ateva’s weight. Don’t pull on the rein and don’t try to guide him. It can turn his head and blind him to the ground and kill you both. If you do nothing with the rein, he’ll follow Ilisidi’s mechieta come hell or high water.”

“Are we going to run?” Jase said. “From what?”

“It’s just an ‘in case.’ ”

Jase gave him one of those looks.

“It’s a possibility, nadi,” Bren said, and then wished he hadn’t said. He wished he’d said, To hell with you, and not shaved the meaning one more time. “You’re not going to find absolutes in this situation. There aren’t any. I’m sorry. I knew I was asking for a hard time up here when I turned matters over to other people. I knew last night things were getting complicated. I figured—maybe we’d get a chance to go down to the water. Somehow. And things might not even involve us.”

“Once we left the fortress,” Jase said in Mosphei’, “I knew we weren’t going fishing.”

“Because you knew I’d lie? You don’t know that.”

There was lengthy silence.

Then Jase said, “We were still going fishing? All around us, people with weapons. People on radios. Hanks. We were going fishing.”

“Well, we will.” It sounded lame even to him, in what he began to see as a long string of broken promises, broken dates, incomplete plans—not professional ones, but personal. He couldn’t explain all that was going on. Jase didn’t understand the motivations. And God knew what conclusions he’d draw.

The silence persisted some distance more. He wasn’t there for the moment. He was across a table from Barb. Barb was saying, When? When, really, Bren?

“You really tellyourself we’re going fishing,” Jase said, “don’t you?”

“Jase, if I don’t plan to do it, we’ll damn sure never get there. At least,” he added, beginning to be depressed, “if you plan a dozen trips, one happens.”

“Are all Mospheirans like you?”

He’d like to think not. He liked to think, on the contrary, that he was better than the flaws that frustrated him in his countrymen. But it was an island full of people living their safe routines, their weekend trips to the mountains, their outings to the market, like clockwork, every week, sitting on a powder keg, electing presidentiwho lived the same kind of lives and left decisions to their chief contributors rather than those with any knowledge or insight.

Delusion played a large part in Mospheiran attitudes.

Delusion that they had a spacecraft, or could build one, with no facility in which to do it.

Delusion that they could fix their deficits when there was suddenly a great need and all their bets came due.

Self-delusion to which, apparently, he was not immune.

“Lifestyle,” he said, with self-knowledge a bitter lump in his chest. “But I still do plan to go fishing, Jase.”

“Just not this trip.”

“Even this trip, dammit! Security alerts go on all the time. I livewith it! In between times, I relax, if I can get a few hours. Nine tenths of the time nothing happens or it happens elsewhere and life goes on. If you’ve planned a fishing trip, it might be possible. We can rent the gear. And hire a boat.”

“It’s a nervous way to live.”

“It is when you park a bloody huge ship over our heads and offer the sun, the moon, and the stars to whoever gets there first! It makes the whole world a little anxious, Jase!”

“Was life more peaceful before we came?”

“Life was absolutely ordinary before you came. You’ve set the whole world on its ear. Don’t you reckon that? Absolutely ordinary people’s lives have been totally disrupted. Absolutely ordinary people have done things they’d never have done.”

“Good or bad?”

“Maybe both.”

They rode a while more in silence. He watched Jago ahead of him, by no means ordinary, neither she nor Banichi.

He lovedJago. He loved both of them.

“A lotof both,” he said.

And a long while later he asked, “ Whydid the ship come back?”

“Weren’t we supposed to?”

He thought about that a moment, thought about it and wondered about it and said to himself of course that was what the ship did and was supposed to do: go places between stars. And this was where other humans were, and why wouldn’t it come here?

But he always argued the other point of view—everyone’s point of view: Barb’s, his mother’s, Jase’s. He’d elaborated in his own mind Jase’s half-given answers in the days when Jase hadn’t been able to say much in Ragi and after that when the pressure mounted to get the engineering translation settled. They’d talked fluently about seals and heat shields. But when he’d asked, in Mosphei’, as late as a handful of days before his tour, Where were you? Jase had drawn him diagrams that didn’t make any sense to him.

And he’d said to himself, when he hadn’t understood Jase’s answer or gotten any satisfaction out of it, well, he wasn’t an astronomer and he didn’t understand the ship’s navigation; or maybe space wasn’t as romantic as he’d thought it was—or maybe—or maybe—or maybe.

Well, but. But. But.

Did delusion play a part in it? Or a human urge to fill out Jase’s participation and make excuses for behavior that otherwise wasn’t satisfying his expectations.

The ship was doing as it promised. The spacecraft was becoming a reality.

But in his failure to find the friendly, cheerful young man he’d talked to by radio link before the drop, he’d insisted on making that side of Jase exist in the apartment.

He’d done all Jase’s side of the conversations in his head, was what he’d done. He’d made up all sorts of answerless answers Jase mightgive, if Jase had the vocabulary, if he had time to sit and talk at depth. Naturally Jase was under stress: language learning did that to a mind. Or maybe—or maybe Jase had been doing the same, filling in between the lines to suit hisinitial impression; and when those expectations didn’t match reality, he felt betrayed.

“Jase,” he said.

“What?”

“Where wasthe ship?”

“I told you. A star. A number on a chart.”

“You know the feeling you had we weren’t going fishing?”

“Yes?”

“It’s what I feel when you tell me that.”

Silence followed. It wasn’t a happy silence. He wished at leisure he hadn’t come at Jase with that.

He wished a miracle would happen and Jase would come out of his sulk and be the person he’d thought he was getting, the person who’d help him, not pose him problems; the person who’d stand by him with reason when the going got tough.

But Barb had done that until she’d had enough. She’d run to marry Paul Saarinson. Maybe Jase didn’t want a career of keeping the paidhi mentally together, considering they had to share an apartment.

Maybe in meeting him, the astonishing thought came to him, Jase hadn’t found the man he’dthought he was dealing with, either. The breakdown of trust might be rooted more deeply than any dispute over truthfulness, in failings of his own. He managed so wellwith atevi. His personal life—

Ask Barb how he got along. Ask Barb how easy it was to deal with him.

He remembered Wilson-paidhi. He remembered saying to himself he wouldn’t ever get to that state. The bet had been among University students in the program that Wilson couldn’t smile. That Wilson couldn’treact. Grim man. Unresponsive as hell.

But at the same time those of them going for the single Field Service slot learned to contain what they felt. You learned not to show it. You studiedbeing unreadable.

Barb had complained of it. Barb used to say—he could remember her face across that candlelit table—You’re not on the mainland, Bren. It’s me, Bren.

It gave him a queasy feeling to realize, well, maybe— maybeit had something to do with the falling away and the anger of humans he dealt with. But he’d told Jase. He’d tried to teach Jase to do it. Jase should realize why he didn’t show expression.

Shouldn’the realize it?

Move that into the category of fishing trips.

Fact was, he’d told Jase notto show emotion with atevi, and when Banichi and Jago walked in, he’d been laughing and lively and all those things he’d taught Jase not to be.

Maybe they should have thought a little less about language early on, and more about communication. Maybe they should have learned first what they expected of each other instead of each resigning himself to what he’d gotten.

“You and I,” he said in Mosphei’, “you and I need to talk, Jase. We need it very badly.”

“We were going to do that out here.”

“I’m sorry.I didn’t remotely know what I was getting you into. I knew it was a chancy time. It’s alwaysa chancy time, especially when the pressure mounts up and you want to get away. I knew present company was the chanciest thing on the planet but the people who can doanything always are. It’s the way it works, Jase.”

“I trust you,” Jase said in a curiously fragile tone—had to say it loudly, with all the thump and creak of the mechieti. “I do trustyou, Bren. I’m trying like hell to.”

“I’ll get you back in one piece,” he said. “I swear I will.”

“That isn’t what I’m worried about.”

“What is?” he asked, thinking he’d finally gotten one thread that might pull up a clue to Jase’s thinking.

But Jase didn’t answer that.

And in the next moment he saw Cenedi rein back while Babs kept going. Something was going on. He thought Cenedi had done that to talk to Banichi.

But he was the target. Cenedi fell all the way back to him and Jase.

“Bren-paidhi,” Cenedi said, as Bren restrained Nokhada from a nip at her rival. “The dowager asks why you avoid her. She told me to say exactly that, and to say that Nokhada still knows her way, nadi, if you’ve forgotten.”

22

Nokhada indeed knew the way, and with a little laxness on his part thought she was being sly about moving forward. Had he touched her with the crop, he’d have been there at the expense of every mechieta in front of her.

As it was, Nokhada announced to the mechieti in her path she was coming through with small butts of her head, a little push with the rooting-tusks against an obstinate flank. Mechieti hide was fortunately thick, and tails lashed and heads tossed, but no blood resulted, just ruffling of well-groomed hair.

Cenedi had lagged back. Nokhada achieved the position she wanted, next to Babsidi, and became quite tractable.

“Ah, well,” Ilisidi said, sitting with that easy, graceful seat. She deigned a sidelong glance. “One can only imagine.”

One didn’t dare say a thing.

“Oh, come, come, nand’ paidhi. Arewe like humans? Or are humans like us? Is it—how am I to put it delicately—technically feasible?”

“One is certain we are not the first pair to have made the—” That led, in Ragi, to a difficult grammatical pass. He was sure he blushed. “To try.”

“Was it pleasant?” she asked, delighting, damn her, to ask.

“Yes, nand’ dowager.” He wouldn’t retreat, and met her sidelong glance with a pleasant smile.

Her grin could blind the sun. And vanished, in pursed lips. “Now that the world knows the paidhi has such interests, there’ll be suchgossip. My neighbor who loves to spy on my balcony will be absolutely convincedof scandal in our little breakfasts, now. We must do it again.”

“I would be delighted, aiji-ma.” He had no need to feign relief to have her take it well. “I treasure those hours you give to me.”

“Oh, not that I have any scarcity of hours! I languish in disuse. My hours are such a little gift.”

“Your hours and your good sense are my rescue, aiji-ma, and so I trespass egregiously on them, but never, never wish to impose.”

“Languishing, I say. And now, now you drop young men from the heavens and expect meto civilize them.—Did I detect strife, nand’ paidhi? Do I find discord?”

“He doesn’t expect fish at this altitude.”

Ilisidi laughed and laughed.

“Ah, paidhi-ji, a fish is what we hope for. A great gape-mouthed fish of a Kadigidi, which thinks to wreck us. I wanted you with me, Bren-ji. I likethe numbers we’ve worked with this far; and I nevertempt an Atageini beyond his virtue.”

He was shocked. Outright shocked. Banichi and Jago had ridden up on his right and he wondered if theyhad accounted how great a temptation the paidhiin posed inside an Atageini perimeter, with the dice in motion, the demons of chance and fortune given their moment to overthrow the order of the world.

Baji-naji. The latticework of the universe, that allowed movement in the design.

Tabini was sleeping with the Atageini: Tatiseigi had made his move to get into the apartment to get at them, for good or ill or just to make up his mind, and Ilisidi had moved in. Ilisidi had possessed herself of the greatest temptation that might tip the Atageini toward a power-grab of their own, just flicked temptation out of Tatiseigi’s reach at the very moment it might prove critical to his choice of direction in these few dangerous days.

Believe that Tabini didn’t see it? Possible. Remotely possible.

But ifTabini should miscalculate, if he should wake up stabbed by an Atageini bride, the Atageini and the Kadigidi alike had to reckon that getting rid of Tabini didn’t kill Ilisidi.

And twicethe Padi Valley nobles had politicked to keep Ilisidi from being aiji.

Dare Tatiseigi move on Tabini now, or move on Ilisidi, who had the paidhiin in the middle of an action that could put them all, if it failed, in Kadigidi hands?

Tabini’s rule was a two-headed beast. He saw that now with crystal clarity.

Bane of my life, Tabini called Ilisidi.

And Tabini had resorted to her in what seemed reckless action when he knew he had to contemplate war with Mospheira.

She hadn’t gone home since.

“Any news?” she asked Cenedi now.

“Quiet still, aiji-ma.”

“Well, well, so long as it lasts.”

The dowager called rest, and Bren actively rodeNokhada back through the company as it drew to a halt, a choice he was sure, in the way he’d come to understand how Nokhada did think, that Nokhada perfectly well understood. She expressed her dislike with flattened ears and a bone-jarring gait which he had come to understand he had to answer with a swat or she’d think her rider wasn’t listening.

But not with the heel, or he’d be through the company like a shot: he used the crop at the same time he kept a pressure on the rein. The gust of breath and the shift into a smooth gait was immediate as she moved through mechieti establishing rights over their small patches of green grass, a touchy business of snarls and status in the herd; and Nokhada breezed past lower-status mechieti with scarcely a missed beat, back to where Jase and the boy were already dismounted.

He stopped Nokhada at the edge of the herd and slid down, keeping the rein in hand and the crop visible, against what otherwise might be a tendency slyly to wander closer to Babsidi during the stop.

The head went down; she snatched mouthfuls of grass.

Jase didn’t ask him, What did the dowager want? The boy didn’t, either. But the boy wasn’t his partner.

Maybe, the amazing thought dawned on him, Jase was waiting for hisally to say something.

And, dammit, the boy was underfoot and all ears, he was sure. He couldn’t send the boy to Banichi. They were talking to Cenedi on matters the boy didn’t need to hear, either. He looked in that direction and met the boy’s absolutely earnest gaze.

And saw the escort. “Nadi,” he said to the man, “Haduni, please brief the young gentleman: we may have to take a faster pace.”

“Nand’ paidhi.” Haduni gave a nod as if he perfectly understood and had been waiting for such an order, then smoothly collected the all-elbows young lord and steered him to the side.

Bren heaved a sigh and with a sharp jerk of two fingers against the rein in his left hand, checked Nokhada’s intent to gain a few meters on her agenda. “He’s very anxious,” he said to Jase. “He sees the reputation of his house at stake.”

“What did they want up there?” Jase obligingly asked the question. Jase did the obvious next step.

“To be sure I knew things were all right,” he said and told himself to relax, let his face relax, useexpression.

And what in hell was he supposed to do? Grin like a fool? He looked at the grass under his feet and looked up and managed a little smile, one he trusted didn’t look foolish. When he knew damned well he hadn’t been shut down with Ilisidi. He just let Jase touch off his defenses, thatwas what he was doing, and it was a flywheel effect of distrust and guardedness.

“Jase, she said Tatiseigi might— might—have moved against us. I’d hope he wouldn’t, but she said his virtue was a lot safer if we weren’t in his reach. I didn’t think that. But I did think things in Shejidan were going to go a lot more smoothly without us in the way. So it was the same move, two reasons.”

Jase was listening, at least, without the anger he’d shown.

“We aregoing to Mogari-nai, nadi?” Jase switched back to Ragi.

“I have no doubt of it. The Messengers’ Guild has been pulling at the rein—” Source of his metaphor, Nokhada tried a different vector and got another jerk of the rein he held, hands behind his back. “And Ilisidi intends to make it clear the authority is in Shejidan, not in the regional capitals. That’s an old issue, the amount of power Shejidan holds, the amount of power the regions have. They’ve fought over it before. Your ship dumping technology into Tabini’s hands has raised the issue again. That’s whythe tension between some of the lords and the capital.”

There followed one of those small, tense silences, Jase looking straight at him as if thoughts alone could bridge the gap.

“Thank you,” Jase said then, carefully controlled. “ Thankyou, nadi.”

“Why?” was the invited question. He asked it, angry in advance.

“It’s the first time,” Jase said, “that I’ve ever felt I’ve heard the truth.”

“I have not—”—lied, he almost said. But of course he had. And would. “I haven’t known what I couldsay.” He changed back to Mosphei’ to be absolutely certain that Jase understood him. “Jase, if I told your ship enough to let them think they could guess the rest and go hellbent ahead, I knewthey could tear the peace apart. You can seenow what the stresses in the atevi system are, and I don’t know the quality of people in office on your ship. But the people in my government who’ve cut the Mospheiran Foreign Office off from communication with the Mospheiran public have completely written off the majority of people on this planet as of no value to them. They’re not pleased with my continuing to operate as theForeign Office, such as it is, but here I am, and here I stay. That, I havetold you. For what you can see with your own eyes, look around you. See how it works. Seethe land. See the people. See everything you came here to see. It’s all I’ve got to offer you.”

And even while he said it he was hedging his bets, telling himself—just get that spacecraft built, get it flying, get atevi up there before politics shuts atevi out of the meaningful decisions.

If he could get help—he’d take it.

But jeopardize that objective? No.

Jase didn’t answer him. He decided that was a relief. He couldn’t debate trust with Jase. It didn’t exist. It might, eventually, but it didn’t, not here, not now. He daren’t debate it with Ilisidi, either, but he did trust her, as far as he could reason what she was doing.

Banichi and Jago—there was his one known quantity, though Tabini never was: believe that those two, who were right now deep in conversation with Cenedi, would bend Tabini’s orders a little to save his neck. He was sure they had done that very significantly at least once. Believe that Tabini valued him andhis objectives? So far he was irreplaceable.

One of Ilisidi’s men came close to him, Haduni, bringing the boy back. He looked in that direction and saw them offloading the baggage from the mechieti.

Are we camping here? he wondered. That didn’t accord with his knowledge of the situation.

No, he thought, seeing men adjusting mechieti harness, we’re going to move.

Harness adjustment was something he didn’t venture to do. There were straps he knew what to do with: mechieti shed a little of their girth after a morning start, especially when they were traveling this hard; and a saddle that slipped more than Nokhada’s had been doing just before the dismount was a problem he didn’t want. Expert handlers moved through the company seeing to any mechieta the rider for one reason or another wasn’t able to see to; and just as the young man was attending to Nokhada’s harness, the discussion the senior security officers had been holding among themselves was breaking up. Banichi had left the group and was leading his mechieta along the edge of the company at a very purposeful stride while Jago and Cenedi went to speak to Ilisidi.

“Banichi-ji?”

“Everything is fine,” Banichi said cheerfully. “Our enemies are being fools.”

“Doing what?”

“Oh, nothing up here. Down the coast. The authorities have caughtone of Direiso’s folk on the Wiigin-Aisinandi line.”

On the train, Banichi meant.

“Illicit radio? Saying what?”

Banichi shot him a guarded, assessing kind of look. “That Tabini-aiji is fortifying Saduri plain and preparing to bomb Mospheiran cities. That he’s seizing Mogari-nai to have absolute control of the radar installations during the aforesaid operation, because he knows a retaliation is coming immediately after he bombs the island and the northern provinces are going to take the brunt of it.”

“That’s absolutely insane!”

“We’re quite sure it is, but it isindicative of Direiso’s objective. She wishes to seize Mogari-nai and the airstrip and say there’s nothing there because she’s thwarted the plot.”

“The plant at Dalaigi.” He had a sudden great fear of harm to Patinandi. “What if it’s a diversion, Banichi-ji? Are we protected there?”

“Oh, we are protecting all such places,” Banichi said. One of the men was adjusting harness, and Bren gave a distracted yank on Nokhada’s rein as she swung her hindquarters and refused cooperation. “We have very heavy security on those plants, especially in facilities where you’ve very diligently pointed out security problems, Bren-ji, and your eye is becoming quite keen in that regard.”

“One is grateful to know so, nadi-ji.”

“Once the report said bombs would fall, we became very much more concerned that the reserve here is a major target—because maintaining that falsehood means controlling this area within a certain number of hours or attacking government facilities within the same time, so they can say we moved the equipment. And Direiso has adherents among Messengers’ Guild officers, but notnecessarily among the membership. That we silenced that radio and were ready with statements laying out Direiso’s plans will at least throw water on the fire. Our press release isbeing routed through Mogari-nai and the local stations arecarrying the official broadcast. It may be significant, however, that Mogari-nai was the last major communication center to pass the aiji’s press release to the broadcast stations.”

It was ominous. Very much so. He made a motion of his eyes toward the heavens. “If theyhave bombs—”

“No, Bren-ji. I assure you, noaircraft will reach us. There are aircraft sitting ready to take action against any craft Direiso can send against us. We learned at Malguri, and we have taken precautions. Not mentioning Tano’s position, which is quiet, but very capable of defending itself. The fortress isancient. But for you alone to know—though possibly Direiso does—even the dust of Saduri is modern. They blow it on. For the casual hiker. This is more than a game reserve. If we’ve kept that secret from Mospheira, numerous people will be surprised.”

He was mildly shocked; and no, his government didn’t tell him everything: particularly the Defense Department with its touchy secrets. His mind raced through memories of dilapidated halls, a row of doors facing their bedrooms that didn’t open and didn’t have windows.

In this vast, open government reserve there were fences, he guessed, that were far more than low stone walls. And he had no idea what other electronic barriers might exist out here, or what those vans he’d seen parked behind the old fortress might contain, but Tano and Algini were surveillance specialists, he had guessed before this, while Banichi and Jago were surely what the Guild so delicately called, with entirely different meaning, technicians.

“We aren’t using the pocket coms to transmit any longer,” Banichi said. “Though I assure you reception is no problem. We listen to a mobile unit up near Wiigin talk to one east of the fortress and know all we need. Thistime, Bren-ji, we are not using a defense heavily infiltrated with the opposition, as we were at Malguri. As for what we need worryabout, there’s one other road that goes up the cliffs from Saduri Township. It supplies Mogari-nai, and tourists use it to tour the cannon fort. The aiji’s forces will keep that road open. Meanwhile—” Banichi’s voice, from rapidfire cataloging of assets, took on an airy quality. “Meanwhile, the dowager will assert her prerogative, as a member of the aiji’s household, to tour the facility. But we have to be careful. To dispossess the Messengers’ Guild of Mogari-nai would tread on Guild prerogatives. Even to save lives, ourGuild will not countenance that kind of operation. Politics, you understand. And in the balance of powers, it iswise to preserve those prerogatives.”

“One understands that much.” A Guild disintegrating would be very dangerous to the peace. As the fall of the Astronomers from credibility after the Landing had been catastrophic for atevi stability: for lords there were successors, but for the Guilds there were not. “Banichi-ji, the aiji does know, I hope, that we can receive data without the earth station. Surely he does know.”

“Yes. But Guild prerogatives demand it go through the Messengers’ Guild no matter where we receive it. The Messengers will bend, nand’ paidhi. Their rebellion will go on precisely as long as that Guild sees other entities defying the aiji with impunity, or until the fist comes down on them. The aiji can no longer ignore Hanks’ challenge to his authority.”

“So we are going to fight, there? The dowager is truly on our side?”

“Fight, nand’ paidhi? Ilisidiis on holiday at Saduri. The television says so quite openly. The television says, during her holiday, she will tour Mogari-nai.” The call was going out to mount up. “Saigimi’s death was a serious blow to Direiso. Tatiseigi’s appearance on television was a second. Badissuni’s attack of heartburn was a third, leaving Ajresi unopposed in the Tasigin Marid, and Badissuni very cooperative with the aiji, if he’s wise. The Messengers’ Guild admitting Ilisidi for a tour is a fourth. Direiso may strike in anydirection, but it’s the business of aijiin to settle their affairs and then the Guilds have no difficulty arranging their policies. Believe me that the Messengers are no different from ourGuild.”

Banichi made his mechieta extend a leg and got up, in that haste the maneuver needed. Others were getting up. Bren had Nokhada kneel and as he rose, turned and landed in the saddle, he saw Jase attempt to do the same.

Attempt. Jase failed, was left clinging to the saddle ring with one foot hung and the other off the ground as the mechieta rose and tried to turn full circle in response to Jase’s unwitting grip on the rein. It was a dangerous halfway, from which a man could fall with his foot still trapped; but Haduni was there instantly to put a hand under Jase and boost him up, disheveled and with his braid loosening, but safe. Jase still pulled, and the mechieta resisted, lifted his head and turned another circle until Jase apparently realized it was his own fault and slacked the grip on the rein.

“It took me a while,” Bren said.

Jase still looked scared. Well a man could be. And dizzy. For a man who had trouble with the unclouded sky and kept taking motion sickness pills, the mechieta turning while he was off balance was not, Bren was sure, a pleasant thing.

“You’re doing fine,” Bren said.

And with no warning but a ripple of motion through the herd Nokhada spun and joined the others in a rush after Ilisidi, who had taken off. Bren looked back, scared for Jase, but he had stayed on. Jago fell back to join him as the herd sorted itself out, Nokhada fought the rein to get forward, and Banichi rode ahead of him.

But the rush settled into a run for a good long while. Ilisidi, damn her, was having the run she’d wanted, a perverse streak she had, a desire to challenge a man’s sense of self-preservation, never mind Jase was fighting to stay on and scared out of good sense.

He dropped further back, a fight with Nokhada’s ambitions, and came past the boy from Dur, who was riding with a death grip on the saddle straps and excitement in his eyes. He came alongside Jase, then, who was almost hindmost in the company. Jase was low and clinging to the saddle, his whole world doubtless shaking to the powerful give and take of the creature that carried him.

“What are we doing?” Jase yelled at him. “Why are we running, nadi?”

“It’s all right!” he yelled back. And yelled, in Ragi, what he’d said on the language lessons when Jase had reached the point of anger: “Call it practice!”

Jase, white-faced and with terror frozen on his features, began suddenly to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, until he wondered if Jase had gone over the edge. But it wasfunny. It was so funny he began to laugh, too; and Jase didn’t fall.

In a while more, as Babsidi ran out his enthusiasm for running, they slowed to that rocking pace the mechieti could hold for hours, and then Jase, having been through the worst, grew brave enough to straighten up and try to improve his seat.

“Good!” Bren said, and Banichi said, riding past him, “Well done, Jase-paidhi!”

Jase glanced after Banichi with a strange look on his face, and then seemed to decide that it wasa word of praise he’d just heard. His shoulders straightened.

The mechieti never noticed. The boy from Dur dropped back to ride with them and with Haduni and Jago. But then Nokhada decided she was going to go forward, giving little tosses of her head and moving as if she could jump sideways as easily as forward, meaning if she found an excuse to jump and bolt, she would.

Bren let her have her way unexpectedly and touched his heel to her ribs, which called up a willing burst of speed around the outside of the herd and up to the very first rank. She nipped into place with Ilisidi and Cenedi, where she was sure she belonged.

“Ah,” Ilisidi said. “nand’ paidhi. Did he survive?”

“Very handily,” he said, and knew then the dowager had kept onepromise she’d made in coming here, to give the new paidhi the experience he’d had.

And Jase had laughed. Jase had sat atop a mechieta’s power and stayed on, Jase had been told by a man he hadn’t trusted that he had done quite well, and Jase was still back there, riding upright and holding his own under a wide open and cloudless sky.

And by that not inconsiderable accomplishment Jase was better prepared if they had to move: it waspractice; and practice like that had been life and death for him—in a lot of ways.

The sun declined into the west until it shone into their eyes and made the land black, and nothing untoward had happened. The sun declined past the edge of the steep horizon toward which they were climbing, and the light grew golden and spread across the land, casting the edges of the sparse, short grasses in gold.

Suddenly, with the topping of a rise, a white machine-made edge showed above the dark horizon, far distant.

Mogari-nai: the white dish of the earth station, aimed at the heavens. Beyond the dish in that strange approach to dusk, the blue spark of warning lights. Microwave towers aimed out toward the west, a separate establishment.

They rode closer, and now the sky above the darkening land was all gold, the sun sunk out of sight. One could hear in their company the sounds that had been their environment all day: the moving of the mechieti, in their relentless, ground-covering strides; the creak of harness; the rare comment of the riders. Somewhere below their sight the sun still shone, and they discovered its rim again as, between the shadow of cliffs falling away before them, the ocean shone faintly, duskily gold—no longer Nain Bay, but the Strait of Mospheira.

The last burning blaze of the sun then vanished still abovethe horizon. The mountains of Mospheira’s heart, invisible in the distance, were hiding the sun in haze.

“A pretty sight,” Ilisidi said.

If they had not struck their traveling pace when they had, they would have arrived well after dark. Ilisidi, Bren thought, had wanted the daylight for this approach to the earth station and its recalcitrant Guild.

A peaceful approach. Banichi had said that was her intent, at least.

23

A prop plane, a four-seater, sat beyond the dish of the earth station, marking the location of the airstrip, and beyond it, a low-lying, modern building, was the single-story sprawl of the operations center.

The vast dish passed behind them, the dusk deepened to near dark, and the company stayed close around the dowager as they rode. Bren eyed the roof ahead of them and had his own apprehensions of that long flat expanse, and the chance of an ambushing shot from that convenient height. He was anxious about their safety and hoped Banichi and Jago in particular wouldn’t draw the job of checking out the place. It looked like very chancy business to him, and chancier than his security usually let him meet.

They stopped. A good thing, he thought.

But the mechieti had scarcely gotten their heads down for a few stolen mouthfuls of grass when the door to the place opened, bringing every mechieta head up and bringing a low rumble and a snort from the mechiet’-aiji, Babsidi, who was smelling the wind and was poised like a statue, one that inclined toward forward motion.

“Babs,” Ilisidi cautioned him. One atevi figure had left the doorway and walked toward them at an easy pace, nothing of hostility about the sight, except the black clothing, and the fact that the man—it wasa man—was armed with a rifle which he carried in hand.

But about the point that Bren was ready to take alarm, the man lifted a hand in a signal and one of Ilisidi’s men rode forward to meet him.

Not even of Tabini’s man’chi, Bren thought, though Banichi had said Tabini was moving; it seemed to be all Ilisidi’s operation. But it was reassuring, at least, that they had had someone on site; perhaps, as Banichi had also said, preparing security for Ilisidi’s tour, much as Tabini’s security had prepared the way for him on tour.

There was some few moments of discussion between the two, then a hand signal, and a few more of Ilisidi’s security went up to the door.

A shiver began in Nokhada’s right foreleg and ran up the shoulder under Bren’s knee. Otherwise the mechieti were stock still. Creatures that had been interested only in grazing at other breaks were staring steadily toward the building, nostrils wide, ears swiveling. They had not put on the war-brass, the sharp tusk-caps that armed the mechieti with worse than nature gave them; but the attitude was that of creatures that might take any signal on the instant and move very suddenly.

But Cenedi and Ilisidi together began to move quite slowly and the rest of the mechieti came with them, across the narrow runway, onto the natural grass of the building frontage.

Men slid down. Ilisidi signaled Babsidi to drop a shoulder, and stepped down from the saddle, retrieving her cane on the way as Cenedi swung down.

Bren tapped Nokhada’s shoulder, nudged her with his foot and as she lowered her forequarters, swung off, keeping his grip on the rein until he was sure that was what he should have done. But everyone was getting down and while Banichi moved off to talk to Cenedi, Jago showed up, and called Jase and the boy in close.

“One expects no difficulty,” Jago said. “But follow me.”

They let the mechieti go, merely tying reins to the saddle ring, and Bren was acutely conscious of the gun he carried in the inside pocket of his jacket as more than a nuisance and a weight that thumped when Nokhada hit her traveling gaits. He was armed and able at least to shoot back. Jase and the boy were not. He gave no odds on Ilisidi, who passed into the building surrounded by rifles and sidearms.

So did they, into a double-doored foyer and into a broadcast operations center, one side wall with two tiers of active television screens and six rows of consoles, some occupied and active despite the presence of armed guards.

An official had joined them, bowed, and offered courtesies, offering drinks and a supper, which the official swore were under the guard of Guild security.

“I’ll see this place first,” Ilisidi said and, walking with the aid of her cane, toured the long rows of counters and consoles with Cenedi beside her, with a handful of her young men around her, as others took up posts on all sides. The technicians couldn’t quite remain oblivious to what was going on, or to the fact that guns were visible: nervous glances attended her movements and those of the men on guard.

There was, the dowager was informed, in a stillness so great there was no need of close eavesdropping, this central command center; and there were, down that hall, the offices, the rest areas, and through the door, the adjacent staff barracks. Her men had been there, one said, and they had posted a guard there and at the outlying service buildings.

“I assure you, aiji-ma,” the director said, “everything is in order.”

“And the paidhi’s messages?”

“Nand’ dowager?” The director seemed dismayed; and whack! went the dowager’s cane on a console end. A score of workers jumped. One bent over in an aborted dive under the counter, which she turned into a search after an escaped pen, and quickly surfaced, placing the pen shamefacedly before her.

Scared people, the Messengers, with officers of their Guild trafficking with the other side, and the Assassins’ Guild guarding the aiji-dowager, a gray eminence in the chanciest atevi politics. Ostensibly she was on a holiday tour including the old fortress, which this communications nerve center had to have known was coming, and the nature of that old fortress some here had to know.

They had to believe she was probablyon the aiji’s side at a moment when other things were going chancy, rapidly, in electronic messages sailing all over the continent.

“Where,” Ilisidi asked, in that shocked silence, in which only Ilisidi moved, “ whereis the paidhi’s mail and whyhas the communication run through this centergone repeatedly amiss? Is this the fault of individuals? Or is this a breakdown in equipment? Does fault lie in this place? Can anyone explain to me why messages lie in this place and do not move out of it in a timely manner? Is it a spontaneous fault of the equipment?”

“No, aiji-ma,” the director said in a voice both faint and steady. “There is no fault of the equipment. I have taken charge of this facility in the absence of the senior director.”

“You are?”

“Brosimi of Masiri Province, aiji-ma. Assistant director of Mogari-nai by appointment of my Guild.”

One did not miss the aiji-ma, that was the address of someone at least nominally loyal; and Ilisidi, diminutive among her guards, was the towering presence in the room.

Ilisidi walked further, looked at one console and the next, and all the while Cenedi and Banichi were near her; but so was a man named Panida, whose talents and function in Ilisidi’s household had always seemed to be very like Tano’s. Panida was generally, in Ilisidi’s apartment in the Bu-javid, near the surveillance station that was part of every lord’s security. And now he paused here and there at certain idle and vacant consoles. Once he flipped a switch. Whether it had been on or off, Bren did not see.

“Nand’ director,” Ilisidi said. “This is a very thin staff I see. Are there ordinarily more on this shift?”

“Yes, aiji-ma. But they went down to Saduri Township.”

“Well, well, and will that improve the efficiency of this staff?”

“I assure the dowager such will be the case.” The director made surreptitious signals to his staff, who uncertainly rose from their seats and, almost as a body, bowed in respect.

“Nadiin.” Ilisidi nodded, and said, by way of introduction: “Bren-paidhi. Jase-paidhi. And their devoted escort, the heir of the lord of Dur.”

“Nand’ director,” Bren said as faces turned toward them. “Nadiin.”

A second round of bows and nods of heads. And the hasty but respectful movement of a young woman who gathered up a heavy stack of paper and proclaimed it, “nand’ dowager, here are all the messages routed through this station in the last ten days. With great respect, aiji-ma.”

“And the messages for the paidhiin?”

A middle-aged man moved to a desk and carefully, with an anxious eye on the behavior of security, gathered up a smaller handful of printout. “This is the phonetic log and transcript, aiji-ma, during the same period, but the translators have all left.”

“One assures you, nadi, the paidhiin do not need translators.” Ilisidi with a casual backhand waved the man in their direction, and the man brought the log and bowed.

The dowager wanted the record read, Bren said to himself. “Thank you, nadi,” he said to the anxious technician, took the thin volume, and set it down. It was the end of the record he wanted, and he was accustomed to the phonetic transcription. He sat down and flipped the pages over to the latest messages.

There were Deana’s transmissions, as late as this morning, included in the limited transcript although they were in Ragi. A cursory glance proved them more grammatical and careful than her conversation in the language—but then, on Mospheira, Deana had her dictionaries at her elbow.

Deana, however, could wait for a moment. For a moment he was on a search for things notnecessarily on government matters, things personal to him, which, if he could find while doing his job—

He was aware of Jase leaning on the counter, reading over his shoulder.

He was aware of his hand trembling as he turned the pages back and on a deep intake of breath he discovered the fear he’d not letsurface since he’d failed to get through on the phones was still very much alive.

More of Deana’s junk. It made up the bulk of the stack and it made him mad. He wanted his own messages. He wanted answers from Toby, what had happened, how his family fared.

He found it.

It said, Bren, mother’s out of surgery. They said it was worse than they thought. But she’s going to be all right. I tried to call. The lines went down. I hope…

The line blurred and he blinked it clear.

… hope you get this. I hope you’re all right. I was sorry we were cut off. I shouldn’t have said the things I did, and I knew it, and all that other crap came out. I wanted to say I love you, brother. And I said that nonsense.

His hand shook uncontrollably. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t think for a moment, except that it wasn’t allowable for him to show disturbance in front of a roomful of atevi, in the service of the dowager. Too much was at issue. He had too much to do. He shoved his way out of the seat, told himself a restroom might give him a moment to get himself together without anyone being the wiser if he just moved slowly and showed no distress. Livesrode on his composure. He couldn’t become the subject of gossip or disgrace to the dowager.

“Jago-ji,” he said. His eyes were brimming and he tried not to blink. “It’s a little warm. Where’s a restroom, please?”

“Nandi.” Jago moved past Jase and, thank God, between him and the rest of the room. “This way.”

“Bren?” Jase asked him.

“Stay there!” he said to Jase, and found he could talk, and if he could get privacy enough to clear his eyes without making a fool of himself, he’d be fine and back before anyone questioned his reactions.

Jago, meanwhile, brought him to the side hall, and to a restroom door, and inside, all the while one could have heard a pin drop outside.

“Bren-ji?”

“It’s all right.” There was a wall basin, and he ran cold water and splashed it into his face. Jago handed him a towel. Atevi restrooms had no mirrors. He trusted he hadn’t soaked his hair. He’d gotten his eyes clear but his gut was still in a knot. “Jago-ji, I’m sorry. I’m fine. How do I look?”

“Ill,” Jago said. “What did you read, Bren-ji?”

He tried to frame an answer. Good newsseemed a little extravagant. He truly wasn’t doing well.

The door cracked. Jago held it with her hand, protective of him. Jase said, “Bren?”

“In a moment, Jase.” Adrenaline surged up, annoyance, anger, he didn’t know what. But Jase persisted.

“I have to talk to him, nand’ Jago. Please.”

“Let him in, nadi-ji,” Bren said, thinking by the tone of Jase’s voice he might have found something urgent in the record. Jago let the door open and Jase slipped in, while he knew the room outside would be concluding something was direly wrong.

“I need to talk to you,” Jase said. “I read the message. I need to talk to you. Alone.”

He didn’t understand. He damned sure didn’t want to discuss his personal life. He had a great deal else weighing on him.

But part of that great deal else was Jase’s cooperation.

“Jago,” he said.

“I will not leave you, Bren-ji.”

Nor should. Jago took herself to the side, however, and back a pace to the wall.

That left Jase as alone as he could manage in a tiny space; and Jase ducked his head and took a breath in the manner of a man with an unpleasant task in front of him. “Bren,” Jase said in a low voice, and went on in his own language, “Yolanda’s trying to get away. She’s coming here. She’s going to try.”

That took several heartbeats to listen to. And a few more to try to figure. Yolanda Mercheson, Jase’s partner from the ship, was going to leaveMospheira?

“Why?” was the only thing he could say, not When? Not How? which were backed up and waiting, but at that point, Cenedi opened the door.

“Nandiin. Is there a problem?”

“We’re all right,” Bren said. His nerves were still wound tight, and he realized that the dowager was being kept waiting. “A moment, Cenedi-ji. Please excuse me to the dowager for just a moment.” One didn’t dosuch a thing; but he did. “Jase. Why? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know the details. I just know she’s coming here. It’s her judgment she can’t work with the island.”

Giving up on Mospheira? The ship was writing off the human population.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “And we’re going to have to explain this to the dowager. When is she doing this?” Jase’s sudden passion for the seashore began to nag at the back of a mind grown suspicious, over the years, of every anomaly. “Where did you make contact? When?”

“On the phone,” Jase said in a faint voice; and Jase was white-faced and sweating. “We had it arranged before we came down, that if one of us found the place we were in impossible, if demands were being put on us that we couldn’t accept, we’d cross the water somehow. And she—called me on the phone and that was how I knew. I knew I had to come at least to the coast. And then if she made it I was bound to find out about it if I was with you, so I could get her—get her to the capital. But I didn’t know it was so big out here. I didn’t know it—”

“Jase, that story’s got so many holes in it—”

“I’m not lying.”

“You were just going to flit over to the coast and pick her up—on what? A boat? A plane? Or is she going to hike over?” He was too shaken right now to be reasonable. Temper was very close to the surface. “How did you know? And don’t tell me you made a phone call I don’t know about. Anything that came into the apartment I doknow about, unless it walked in on two legs.”

“No. It didn’t. We had it arranged, Bren, we didn’tknow what we were putting ourselves into, and we knew there was a potential for problems with the atevi side; we knew there was a potential for problems on the island, too, but we really thought if things broke down they’d break down here, not there. So we said—if we had to signal trouble—one of us would say—would say there was a family emergency. We figured it was the one thing even atevi might understand and let one of us reach the other. And whoever—whoever had to run for it, it was going to be the other one who had somebody get sick. Or die, if it was a life and death situation. She said my father died, Bren. She’s in real trouble.”

He mighthave let expression to his face. He wasn’t entirely sure. He was angry. He was embarrassed, and angry, and had a clear idea Jago followed most of it. He’d been through the entire government with Jase’s lie. He’d intervened in an already touchy situation with a Guild half of whose local members had fled the site they were standing in.

“I didn’t know the atevi,” Jase said. “I didn’t understand the way things are set up here. I didn’t know you had realproblems yourself, and then I did know and I didn’t know how I was going to make it work and get her to the mainland when you had far worse troubles than I could claim to and you weren’t getting your family out. I knew it wasn’t going to work the way we’d planned, and I felt like hell about your situation, and I didn’t know what to do except get over here somehow and get to the shore and know if she made it I’d be here—”

“You know,” Bren said, with far better control of his voice than he thought he’d have, “you know I could take about any of it, piece at a time. I could understand your lying to me. I could accept you had to. But you took after meabout lying, Jase. You went all high and holy about mylying, and you wanted meto apologize to you, when you damned well knew it was the other way around, Jase, that’s what I can’t understand.”

“I didn’t know I could believe you!”

“And now you can.”

“Now I do,” Jase said.

“Wasn’t the plan that we’d sendfor her? Or was this something else, Jase? Are we hearing one more story?”

“I didn’t want to call for her to come over here into something worse than she was in. And I didn’t dare give her a come-ahead. I was with strange security. I couldn’t get you for four days, Bren. I couldn’t ask the staff. You said be careful with them. By then it was too late. My call to my mother—the ship hadn’t heard from Yolanda. Not in four days. And I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you want to come out here. And it’s not what you expected. And nowyou trust me.”

“Everything you’ve told me,” Jase began, but now hisvoice was shaking. “Everything so far makes sense. I believe Yolanda’s leaving the island is tied to what Deana Hanks is doing, it’s tied to everything you’ve told me. I’ve been trying all the way out here to find a way to tell you what was going on, but every time I tried I ran into something elsethat wasn’t what you’d led me to think. I didn’t know but what Yolanda was leaving the island withHanks. But I don’t think so, now. By everything I’ve heard, I don’t think so. These people outside don’t make me think so. The business in the apartment didn’t make me think so. The dowager doesn’t. But I just haven’t known what to do, Bren. I tried to find out the truth—and at the first you were lying to me, and you work for the Mospheiran government, andfor the aiji, and I didn’t know where you stood, and everything was coming apart.”

That made sense. The fishing trip. The damned fishing trip. Every lie they’d told each other, every difference of perceptions two hundred years of separation made in two sets of humans.

And if Yolanda Mercheson was pulling out of Mospheira, there were going to be some angry and desperate people on the island, who were only going to make matters more tense and more desperate for all of them remotely involved.