Pretender

"Pretender" by C. J. Cherryh

For Sharon and Steve,

who have walked us off cliffs

and helped us move books.

1

The room had suffered, not from the attackers, but from the defenders of the house, who had taken no pains at all about recovering ejected shells—the detritus of combat was scattered about the floor, a few items lying on the rumpled coverlet of the bed, on the table. One, an apparent ricochet, having landed on the floor around the corner, in the large bath. Damage from the attempted intrusion of the enemy, numerous holes pocked the walls and woodwork. At some point during the battle for the house, someone among the room’s defenders had shot an exit hole through the door, complementing the several inbound rounds that had taken out the door lock and lodged in an opposing wallc without, one hoped, catching any of the house’s defenders along the way. The door had been kicked open after that, evident by the scuff marks on the paint near the shattered lock, as the invaders rushed the room. But the foremost intruder from the hall had hit a chest-high wire at that point, and Bren was very glad the staff had cleared away the evidence.

He was, considering all the other scars of war, overwhelmingly glad to find his computer where he had left it, hidden behind a stack of spare towels on the bottom shelf of the linen pressc neither defenders nor invaders having had an inclination to open the storage cupboard of spare towels and bed-sheets. No stray shot had hit it, nothing had damaged it, and, on his knees, having extricated the precious machine and its accompanying security modem from their hiding spot, Bren sat on the floor in front of the cabinet with both on his lap, too exhausted, mentally and morally, to struggle up again.

“Is something wrong, Bren-ji?” Jago appeared by him, and he tucked the computer case under his arm, clenched the modem in his hand, and made the effort to get up. Jago helped with a hand under his elbow, lifting him to his full height—which, for a tall human, was about equal to her black-clad shoulder. Even Jago appeared the worse for wear at this hour, her Guild leathers and her ebony skin alike streaked with pale dust from the road and the shattering of plaster, her usually immaculate pigtail a little wind-frayed from a wild ride and a wilder night. Bren’s own pale hands showed bloody scrapes. He had dirt under his nails, which would have been a scandal to his domestic staff if they had been here and not up on the station. They were all of them, himself and his atevi bodyguard, candidates for a good long soaking bath. He smelled of human sweat, Jago of that slightly petroleum scent, but a bath seemed out of the question at the moment. There seemed too much to do to contemplate such a luxury this afternoon, there was no domestic staff at hand to take care of the cleanup: It was all up to them,- and he was sure that once he sank into warm water, he would be completely lost.

“Tired, Jago-ji,” he murmured, inserting the modem into a case pocket. “Simply tired.” He heaved the precious computer’s carrying-strap up to his shoulder, not sure what else to do with the computer, wondering whether he should go on using the same hiding place and being too exhausted to be confident in his logical choices at this point. He hadn’t so much as taken his coat off since their arrival in the room, and his clothing bore mud, soot, and the scrapes of hedge branches, not to mention mecheita-spit and bloody rips in cloth he had taken riding through a gap in the estate’s wire fence. “But one dares not lie down yet.”

“Let us check the bed,” Jago said, and left him in order to do that check, electronically, with one of the little handhelds her Guild used.

Checking for bugs. For booby traps. Her partner, Banichi, was over by the windows, likewise engaged, and Tano and Algini, the other pair of his bodyguards, were in the bath, also looking for bugs and explosives, one surmised. All of them were gathering up shell casings.

“Is the chair safe?” he asked, meaning the fragile green-and-white-striped and doubtless pricelessly historical item in the corner.

Fragile from the atevi viewpoint: For a human, child-sized on an atevi scale, the chair was more substantial, even well-padded, and he was glad when Jago came back, surveyed it, and pronounced it safe for him to sit in.

Lord Tatiseigi, lord of the estate, had had his domestic and security staff make the first sweep of the premises, and they had cleaned up the bodies, blood, and broken items before they declared the room fit for occupancy. In any event, these rooms had fared better than the suite next door, where Kadagidi clan Assassins had made their actual entry into the house, and possibly left gifts that made one just a little anxious at the moment about standing near the north wall. Bren had less confidence in his host’s staff than in his own—Tatiseigi’s staff were competent at their work—competent, if woefully under-equipped in communications and electronics—but he felt much safer knowing his own staff was giving it their own close inspection, with more skill, recent practice, and far better equipment.

Water started running in the bath, a thunderous flood in that huge, atevi-scale bathtub. It was a seductive sound, and more than a testing of the plumbing, since it went on. Tano and Algini had made an executive decision and started drawing hot water for the household.

And Bren looked at his hands, at the grime, the cuts, the stray mecheita-hair and mecheita-sweat that had gotten all over his sleeves and trousers, reconsidering the bath question and the question of letting the adrenaline run down.

The unpleasant fact was the day was well advanced and they still weren’t assured the Kadagidi weren’t coming back tonight.

Or, worst of all thoughts, and one that had been at least a passing topic of discussion downstairs, their victory—and the knowledge Tabini was on the premises—might drive the Kadagidi to more desperate measures, even before dark: They might be desperate enough to attempt an air strike, in which case there was no safety and no time to settle in here as if there were. True, the Assassins’ Guild had passed a formal resolution condemning attack by air as anathema in clan warfare, and in that resolution declared that the Guild would exercise severe and automatic sanctions against violators. But the Guild as a whole had not turned a hand to prevent the overthrow of Tabini-aiji, had it? It had not bestirred itself to condemn the Kadagidi lord, Murini, for setting himself up as aiji in Tabini’s place, had it, then? The Guild had not leapt in to protect Tabini’s grandmother and his heir when they, innocent parties in any dispute between the two clans, returned from space.

The Guild had not intervened last night to prevent the Kadagidi from attacking them here in a neutral clan’s province. So there was a little justifiable suspicion downstairs that the Guild had not supported Tabini-aiji as whole-heartedly as they ought before his downfall, and that their lack of response in preventing a third clan being attacked had allowed some already questionable moves, all on one side of the equation.

Still, a man in the position of Lord Murini of the Kadagidi, who had gotten the Guild to take this dubious position of neutrality, letting him stage a bloody coup in the capital and declare himself ruler of the Western Association—which was to say, the whole continent—still had to worry about one potent force in atevi politics, and that force was public opinion. The various clans only recently united, had a long history of independent thought and independent and regional action. There associations within the Association which were historically much stronger than any modern ties, and Murini was already risking his neck by proclaiming himself aiji before the blood of household staff was dry on the carpet.

More, granted he had gotten the Assassins’ Guild to stay out of action, he was beholden to someone for that favor. He dared not go violating publicized Guild resolutions, creating a scandal for Guild leadership, and worse, contravening the Guild’s established principles of politics in his new-minted claim to power.

So there were three powers, all teetering out of equilibrium: the people, the Guild, and the man who called himself (with his clan) the new authority. And if any one of the former two tipped away from him, Lord Murini, so-named Murini-aiji, stood to lose all his advantage. It would be calamitous for his authority if the Assassins’ Guild decided suddenly to take the side of Tabini-aiji, who was not dead, and who was, in fact, currently lodged four rooms down, his staff going through much the same precautionary cleanup of premises. It was very clear that Tabini would accept Guild neutrality, but hold a grudge for its inaction in preventing his overthrow, and might forgive that grudge if the Guild now budged toward his side.

So the last twenty-odd hours had brought a very delicate time for both claimants to the aijinate: Murini, the upstart would-be aiji, with ancient ambitions of an ethnically different clan, had relied on popular discontent under Tabini-aiji’s authority to seize power; Tabini, overthrown, but now with allies— themselves—newly returned from space, now had records and testimony that might change public opinion. In a few days, Murini’s unchallenged supremacy had slid a few degrees, and now the whole thing had headed downhill gathering calamity like a snowball provoking avalanche. Step one: the dowager’s party, including Tabini’s young son, had arrived from deep space and landed onworld, in spite of Murini’s plan to keep the shuttle fleet entirely out of action. They had immediately presented themselves on the doorstep of Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini, the young heir’s great-uncle, and by that action, had put Lord Tatiseigi to the choice of sheltering them or turning his young relative away.

Step two: Murini’s Kadagidi clan, neighbor to Tatiseigi— who had thought they were going to chastise the elderly and habitually neutral Tatiseigi for receiving Tabini’s grandmother and son under their roof—had not only failed in two nights of trying to breach the house and assassinate them all, but last night had found the Atageini’s neighbor to the west, Taiben, supporters of the old regime and relatives of Tabini-aiji’s clan, coming to the Atageini’s defense. It was an unthinkable combination of clans: Taiben and the Atageini had been at loggerheads for hundreds of years, and now they found common cause against the Kadagidi, for the boy’s sake.

Then, third step, Tabini-aiji himself, unheard from for the better part of a year, had shown up to defend his grandmother and his heir, risking life and reign on this one dice-throw: rescue Tatiseigi, drive off the Kadagidi, and support a new compact between Taibeni and Atageini lords.

Suddenly the Kadagidi control of their local Padi Valley neighborhood wasn’t looking as secure as it had three days ago, and centuries of Atageini neutrality in the region began sliding more and more toward commitment to a cause, namely restoration of Tabini-aiji to rule in Shejidanc because that would set a half-Atageini great-nephew up as heir.

So the sun was up. The ancient Atageini house at Tirnamardi still stood, if battered, in the middle of a province now annoyed with the Kadagidi and feeling massively insulted. The historic premises were pocked with bullets, Atageini house stables were burned and its venerable hedges were in tatters, not to mention the damage in the foyer and upstairs, while its lawn held an encampment of neighboring Taibeni and their large and numerous—and now hungry—mounts. The province took these affronts personally and supported their offended lord.

Who overall had fared surprisingly well under such heavy assault, the old premises proving their ancient, blunt-force construction methods had produced very solid walls. The Atageini house stood, and stood well. By the sound of the flood in the bathroom, its plumbing evidently worked and its boilers must be up, producing hot water for the sore and weary household, to judge by comments that wafted out of the bath.

So the aiji-dowager and the aiji had won the first several rounds of the fight, if not the war that was surely preparing. Murini sat in the capital claiming to be the popularly-supported aiji while Tabini-aiji sat in a Padi Valley lord’s house maintaining that he still was. Meanwhile Lord Tatiseigi, their host, was still muttering about the Guild’s general ban on no-holds-barred attacks and its rules about historic properties and premises, as if this was sufficient to preserve the Atageini province and its towns from a repetition of last night. Most of Lord Tatiseigi’s security, who were members of that Guild, held far less optimistic opinions on that score, and senior members of Tabini’s security and the dowager’s were down on the lower floor, laying plans for coping with what they were sure would come with nightfall.

As for one Bren Cameron, paidhi-aiji, interpreter of foreign affairs, Lord of the Heavens and so on and so forth, he sat in the one safe chair in an unsafe world, wondering whether he should open up his computer and look up his notes on the finer print of Guild regulations, searching for loopholes for further attack and simultaneously wondering whether, if he took his boots off to go take advantage of that wonderful hot water in the bathroom, he could possibly get them back on.

He had blisters, he was sure, in places he would rather not describe to his staff. Numerous wood splinters were lodged in his palms. He was amazingly sore.

But he had recovered his computer. And because he had it, he had all his records from space and from the voyage. And because he had those, he possessed detailed evidence which could argue that Tabini-aiji’s unpopular actions had produced results well worth the sacrifices. It was a precious record, and there was a backup for what was stored here—but one copy was in orbit over their heads, and another in his brother’s hands—he hoped safely back on Mospheira by now. On the mainland, on atevi soil, where it was most needed, this was the only copy he could hope to lay hands on, and he wasn’t eager to let the precious computer leave his hands until he had gotten that report to Tabini.

All things considered finally, that was the highest priority, to get a printout or a disk where Tabini could read it and understand what he had. It was the highest priority, even when Tano came out of the bath and reported that the tub was well on its way to being filled, assuming the hot water held out that long.

It was true that in his present state, he was unfit for an audience: even while the world tottered, conventions and custom prevailed, and a man, even the Lord of the Heavens, had to be respectfully presentable to authorityc especially an authority shaken by events.

“You may have the water first, nandi,” Tano began, as Algini also came out of the bath—but at that moment a racket broke out in the hall outside their suite, a stream of angry shouting. He could not make out words. He looked in that direction, down the short entry hall, in some alarm, and Tano went as far as the outer door and listened, while Banichi and Jago waited with Algini, hands on sidearms.

“Cenedi is out in the hall, explaining certain things to the household staff,” Tano said wryly, which drew a little amusement out of them all. One was ever so glad to find Cenedi alive today, and clearly indignant: None of them doubted that Lord Tatiseigi’s household staff needed certain key points laid out before them and the head of the dowager’s bodyguard was the man to do it—not least bringing home the fact that most of Lord Tatiseigi’s security equipment belonged in a museum, not active service. Even the paidhi understood certain facts without explanation, notably that there was a very good chance that the intruders who had gotten into the house last night, not to mention spies predating them, might well have installed bugs, and wise servants would not discuss household business in any area until security with proper equipment had cleared itc Proper equipment. That was a sore spot. Security with proper equipment necessarily involved outsiders poking about in Lord Tatiseigi’s household security, even bringing in some outsiders, namely Taiben clan, with whom the Atageini maintained a centuries-old feud, while the bodyguard that Tabini had brought in had its own opinions, and certainly Banichi had voiced his.

Outside security having access to house equipment had been one major sticking point of discussions downstairs. In the paidhi’s staff’s case, certain things they had were unique on the planet, a matter they had not entirely explained to the Atageini; anything that had come in from outside was better than what existed here. The Atageini lord was upset with the implications, his servants were all indignant, and the Guild security employed by the Atageini were in a particularly glum mood, having lost members of their staff due to deficiencies they themselves had doubtless pointed out to their old-fashioned lord long since. No, no, no, their lord would say: he bought quality to defend his house and his province. Quality items once purchased ought to be good for decades if not the next generation—Lord Tatiseigi had no understanding at all of how radically the advent of electronics and computers had changed that basic precept of atevi economy. Quality things lasted for generations, did they not? One bought the most expensive and it was clearly going to last for decades.

And, oh, emphatically, one could never trust security outside one’s own man’chi, one’s own loyalty. That was a principle to which the Atageini had adhered for centuries. It had preserved their power, their autonomy, even within the aishidi’tat. It had guaranteed the aiji had a refuge when things came to crisis. Lord Tatiseigi would very tactfully suggest so. Did it not prove his case?

Never mind that a little support from Tatiseigi would have meant joining the detested Taibeni in passing certain bills in the legislature, and made the whole Kadagidi defection more difficult.

Things had gotten damned hot downstairs, once history came under discussion, and that had diverted the discussion into details unrelated to Lord Tatiseigi’s antique defenses.

But Tabini-aiji had, aside from the argument, insisted, guest that he was under this roof, and Lord Tatiseigi had quietly and very reluctantly agreed to supplement his own leaky surveillance equipment. Or at least most of it. So the scene downstairs had ended, an hour ago, discussion having gotten around to old pieces of failed legislation, and the Taibeni-Atageini feud, which the aiji outright insisted had to be buried.

The particular source of the near-disaster in the last two days, the item that had cost staff lives, had been Lord Tatiseigi’s communications units. It had turned out they might just as well have phoned the neighboring Kadagidi province outright and advised them that the paidhi and his staff had gone out chasing Tabini’s eight-year-old heir halfway to Taiben, who were being asked in to aid their old enemies. The Kadagidi could have no doubt now that Taiben had responded, and that they were all, including the heir, the aiji-dowager, and the aiji himself with his Atageini-born consort, reinstalled in Lord Tatiseigi’s house, a growing nucleus of the old adminstration reconstituting itself apace, a threat to the Kadagidi’s theft of authority.

The latter details had doubtless leaked far and wide among the Padi Valley clans before Tabini’s staff had gotten the last die-hard user of the compromised system to shut down transmissions and quit gossiping on the network. The fact of the dowager’s and Tabini’s presence in Lord Tatiseigi’s house was likely on the morning news in Shejidan, for that matter, because reports of the disaster, the attack, the resistence, and the advent of former administration into the Atageini province had all flowed back and forth on that compromised network.

The first result of the gossip had turned up this morning, as ordinary Atageini provincials, shopkeepers, farmers, and town laborers en masse, all linked into that network, had rolled onto the estate grounds to join their threatened lord’s defense against what they perceived as an assault against their sovereign rights. An untidy host of town buses and farm-to-market trucks had pulled up on the formal cobbled drive in front of the house, and no few armed farmers had turned up with tractors and small earthmovers, very truculent and martial arrivals in the lower hall. Hearing that someone wanted to shut down their lord’s communication system, they had involved themselves and their outraged civil liberties in the dispute about the safety of the system, a matter of local pride.

They had backed down only because they had finally gotten it through their heads that the apparent Guildsman in black was not an Atageini security officer, but Tabini-aiji himself, arguing with their lord, and proposing to improve local communications, if they could only shut down the core of it for a certain number of hours.

The whole matter of the civil protest had started because Taibeni rangers, of that hated neighboring clan, had set up some sort of competing communications installation in their camp on the manicured front lawn, a much more state-of-the-art system about which the Taibeni were as secretive and defensive as the Atageini were about their own network. Lord Tatiseigi had demanded that rival network be shut down, claiming the Taibeni were spying on his defenses—the Taibeni being older enemies than the Kadagidi themselves. That ancient feud had boiled on under the whole debate, and the presence of the farmers and heavy equipment operators had provoked a haughty delegation from the Taibeni leadership, arriving to support Tabini-aiji against Tatiseigi’s provincials. That had been the point at which the paidhi-aiji had decided to retire quietly.

But argumentative as all sides were, and no matter the simmering feuds between Taiben and the Atageini, the presence of those lowland farmers and those high forest rangers alike guaranteed that the Kadagidi would meet more opposition today than had already sent them packing back to their own province last night. The line of buses and trucks out there might give the Kadagidi pause, politically as well as tactically. At least for the daylight hours.

“One has no idea how long it may be, nadiin, before anyone downstairs has time to consider domestic requests,” Bren said. “But at the earliest, I should be very obliged if I can persuade our host to let me connect to a printerc granted we can disconnect from the network.”

The household computers had become an object of extreme contention in the communications issue too. But all he wanted was a computer with available backup, a printer, and a considerable lot of paper to put information out that, in his own opinion, someone needed to hear. It was a report, a document which itself might not be prudent to produce in a house likely to be assaulted tonight; but he was down here to make that report, and if it got out, even into the hands of the opposition, it would create gossip and questions—but it was far more useful to get it into Tabini’s hands, ammunition against such arguments as proceeded downstairs, if only he could persuade Tabini to hear him on the topic.

“One is reliably informed the aiji has come upstairs, insisting on a bath,” Banichi said, pausing in his careful examination of bullet holes in the walls. “We should all be safe for a few hours, Bren-ji, and the aiji has retired, perhaps for the rest of the day. The debate has doubtless exhausted everyone.”

Banichi knew his frustration. And knew the importance of what he wanted to print.

“If one might hand the report to his staffc if one could gain access to one isolated machinec”

“The aiji’s staff indicates to us that he will rest after his bath,”

Jago said, and the subterranean text was that his own staff had tried to get the audience he had asked for—tried, and gotten nothing. The aiji had rebuffed that approach as he had deflected all other attempts. The paidhi’s influence had been a major grievance behind the coup. He knew it. He had not gotten his own audience, his staff met opposition: It was a standoff. But even if it made Tabini angrier than he was, he still had to get that document into Tabini’s hands and get him to read it.

“Go,” Jago said. “Have your own bath, Bren-ji. We have told the aiji’s staff the gist of things. More than that, Cenedi will brief them, if they will not hear us.”

Cenedi, the dowager’s chief of security, was clearly their best hope: whatever Tabini’s feelings toward the paidhi-aiji, the aiji-dowager would get through, and Cenedi, in her name, could grab staff by the lapels and talk urgent sense to themc all sorts of urgent sense. But one also had to worry whether Tabini, with new staff around him, the others having perished, might not be subject to a new filter of information. They were Taibeni, but not all; and Bren had never known them.

“I shall, then,” he said.

“We have sent for clothes,” Jago said. “One still hopes.”

It was by no means his security’s job. But his clothing, adult but child-sized, posed a major problem: It was not as if they could run to a local shop, even for the most basic items, and Tatiseigi’s hospitality had provided no domestic services ordinary to such a house. Their host was extremely harried, one had to understand, his housekeeping staff already pressed to the limits, and as exhausted as the security staffc but the plain fact was Tatiseigi detested humans as much as he hated Taibeni, with as much history behind the feeling: he hated their look, hated their influence, their technology, and their continued presence on the planet, and having a human house-guest attendant on the general destruction of his lawn, his hedges, and the tranquility of his province had clearly not made him change his mind on the topic.

And if all that were not enough, Tatiseigi personally and as a close relative resented the paidhi’s former influence with Tabini-aiji and his current influence with the dowager. Most particularly Tatiseigi resented his relationship with the young lord, the aiji’s son—Tatiseigi’s own great-grandnephew, who had stood up for the paidhi in no uncertain terms.

Oh, the paidhi was under Lord Tatiseigi’s roof on tolerance, no question, no matter that he and his staff—and the aforementioned young lord, with the detested Taibeni—had helped rescue the house from destruction last night. Lord Tatiseigi’s view was that the house would never have been attacked and damaged in the first place if not for the paidhi’s past influence, his support of this radical new space technology, its economic disruption, and the upheaval it wrought among the provinces. Consequently, the paidhi and his atevi staff could quite nicely go to hell—so long as the aiji-dowager didn’t notice his departure. So, no, there were no domestic servants to help them, it was hardly graceful to protest it from his tenuous position, and he had no wish to provoke another argument downstairs.

But the sad truth was, he, born a nice democratic Mospheiran fellow, had grown pitifully dependent on clothes turning up miraculously arranged in his closet, the socially appropriate garments appearing in the hands of servants who would help him dress. Lace would be starched and hand pressed, every detail of his attire and his bodyguards’ black leather rendered immaculate without their much thinking about it or questioning what they were to wear on what occasion. Everything would be perfect—if his own staff were here. If he needed delicately hint at something, his staff would talk to house staff, or to any other lord’s staff, and miracles would happen, appointments would turn up, protocols would be settled, and he would never hear about the difficulties.

His staff being up on the station, he now had to think about such details, down to finding clean socks. And the paidhi’s odd-sized wardrobe, at the moment, consisted of a single change of clean formal clothes packed into a soft traveling bag that had been tossed onto fishy ice, thrown down into dirt, bounced around a bus, tied onto a mecheita, tossed into this room, and shoved against a baseboard during last night’s armed assault. What he had worn yesterday was a total loss. The pale trousers were brown with dirt about the seat and knees, black with soot, and stained with blood, not to mention ripped from fence wire and branches. His cold-weather coat, no cleaner than the trousers, was ripped by the selfsame wire the length of the lower arm. His white, lace-cuffed shirt, where the coat had not covered it, was stained with every substance possible to find in the landscape, not to mention human and atevi blood. His boots had a seam parting along the right toe, in addition to the scuffs and mud.

As it was, he decided if Tabini was not going to be available and if no printer was to be had, he should put his computer back into the hiding place that had protected it through the attack—they had no way of knowing at what time another alarm might sound—and see what he could do about the clothing situation on his own. Jago certainly wasn’t his valet, and his security staff had enough on their hands.

Hefting the light computer case back up into its safe place hurt.

Getting into his baggage on the floor and searching into the tangled mess of clothing inside discovered splinters in his palms he had not yet found. And the clean shirt he pulled out of the duffle was, as he had foreseen, by no means ready to wear. The lace had gone mostly limp. The body was more than rumpled: it had pressed-in wrinkles.

The remaining spare trousers likewise showed fold and crumple marks.

But they were at least clean. He found clean underwear. And socks. He got up and hung the clothes in the closet, which he should have thought to do yesterday, and began, stupidly, to strip off what he was wearing, right there in the bedroom, as he would have done on the ship.

Someone rapped at the outer foyer door. He dived, caught up his pistol from his dirty coat out of the pile of clothing he had just dropped on the floor, and, both sleeves in one hand, held the coat for cover, moving into clear shot of that door as Jago, armed, walked out into the short inner hall to answer it.

Two arrivals. They looked like domestic staff, in Atageini colors, muted green and gold. One was a woman, a rather substantial woman. And with a little bow and the exchange, presumably, of courtesies and names, they excused themselves right past Jago’s bemused stare and came in to survey the premises and the situation. Bren stood holding his gun in one hand and anchoring the coat with the other, and the two servants bowed and reported themselves to Banichi as if the lord of the establishment were part of the furniture. Jago had followed them in; she stood behind the pair, hand on her pistol, just stood, wearing no peaceable look. Tano and Algini stood in mirror image, hands likewise positioned.

“We are instructed,” the man said with a sideward, embarrassed glance at Bren, “to provide assistance to the paidhi’s household.”

Staff help. From Lord Tatiseigi. The sky would fall next. Then he decided it might not be a lie. The aiji-dowager or Tabini himself might have requested special dispensation for them—if either had happened to notice the conditions in which the old lord had settled them.

But it would be impolite to seem astonishedc no matter he suspected their sashay past Jago’s forbidding presence might be a reconnaissance for Tatiseigi as much as a desire to report themselves properly to Banichi, as de facto head of staff. House servants might be Guild, just the same as bodyguards in uniform, and if they were reconnoitering, seeing if he had pocketed the bath soap, then he was prepared to be annoyed beyond the slight they paid.

“The premises are presently secure, nadiin,” Banichi said curtly.

“We need laundry done. Boots seen to.” Menial tasks, all. The most menial. Banichi was likewise highly annoyed; if human ears could pick that up with no problem at all, the intruders could certainly figure it out. And as the pair’s survey of the room finally included the very obvious human, Bren held his coat in front of him and bowed his head in as pricklishly gracious an acceptance as a man could give while standing naked in view of strangers.

“Clean clothes would be delightful,” he said, “nadiin. There has been a problem in that regard.”

“Astringents, liniments, and plasters,” Jago said from behind their backs. “A medical kit, nadiin, if you please. Ours is for emergencies.”

“Soap,” from Algini, “nadiin.”

“Indeed,” the man of the pair said, and looked around the room full circle as if taking inventory of the historic vases and the condition of the furniture—perhaps because of the bullets that had flown last night, but one was still hardly sure. “Is all the paidhi’s staff lodged in these quarters?”

“Guild security,” Jago said frostily from their backs. “We are on duty.”

There was additional space and cots in a little closet of a room off the short entry hall. It was an extremely minimal apartment, not designed for a gender-mixed staffc but where Jago slept wasn’t in these strangers’ need-to-know.

“Towels, first,” Jago reiterated, “nadiin. We shall be very glad of towels.”

“Immediately,” the man said, with another bow, this last a little more courteous, and aimed toward Bren, as if he had finally gotten his mental bearings or overcome his shock. “My name, nand’ paidhi, is Timani.”

“Adaro,” the woman said, likewise bowing. “One is honored to serve.”

Bows on all sides. A little relaxation of manner. “Jago,” Jago said.

“Banichi. Tano. Algini.” It was all staff-to-staff, the sort of thing that might have been done in the backstairs, if this suite had been large enough to have proper servant passages. Introduction of the lord of the household didn’t belong at the bottom of that list. The two Atageini servants, after the initial shock, had avoided quite looking at the half-naked human. And still tried not to.

“Honored, nadiin.” A bow from staff to staff, and a quick departure.

“Amazing,” was Banichi’s acid comment. Lord Tatiseigi, actively insulting to a human under his roof, had never evinced the least interest in seeing his human guest properly dressed, fed, or sheltered on their first night. Now he sent his servants, while the house was in crisis, and while the lawn was full of Taibeni rangers?

And the servants of this conservative country estate had just conducted their business past the lord’s presence, ignoring him entirely, while snippily questioning Jago’s presence, a woman on a man’s staff?

Bloody hell, Bren thought. He had wanted servants. He was ready to pitch this pair out.

“The aiji may have requested them,” Jago said.

Tabini had not seen Lord Tatiseigi’s performance on their arrival, and might have no idea they had been only scantly seen to. “Or the aiji-dowager,” Bren said, “possibly even without consulting Lord Tatiseigi.”

That thought afforded Banichi and Jago a grim amusement.

Ilisidi had been romantically and politically involved with Lord Tatiseigi in her reckless youth, perhaps even while married to Tabini’s late grandfather, and it was true she had no hesitation in ordering Tatiseigi’s staff as if she were still resident here. It was a good guess that Ilisidi was behind it, and if she was, he had hopes of seeing his wardrobe resurrected, if only the precious pair came back with an iron.

Meanwhile, the bath water would not wait forever, which meant the paidhi-aiji should take his pale, skinny human body off to the tub before two servants became fortunate three and then five and seven—granted that they were, in fact, going to be providing clean sheets and towels and pressing his clothes in the bedroom.

And just wait, he thought with grim satisfaction, until they asked more directly where Jago did sleep, and just wait until that answer reached the old lord’s ears. It was the one particular of their domestic arrangement he had never broadcast for the world’s consumption. And if this house had not made arrangements for Jago, then the scandal was theirs to deal with.

He took out his pocket com, the spare ammunition clip, and his pill bottle, taking them with him as things he had no wish to surrender to Atageini servants, and dropped the coat back onto the pile of hopeless clothes on the floor before, gun in hand, he walked into the tiled bathroom. He laid the firearm and the other items safely on a tiled shelf above the slosh-line, but where he could reach the weapon and the clip if an alarm sounded. The tub, which would have qualified as a small pond in any human garden, was nearly full, though water was still cascading in from the fire hose-sized faucet. It was a bath built for socializing. It would have been a bath sufficient for grandest luxury, if its owner had decided to equip it with sufficient towels, scents, and oils, and if he had sent his servants to provide tea and other amenities for relaxation. There was not, in such an upstairs room, a mud drain, as there was in belowstairs baths, for servants, for hunters returning from the field, but there was at least a drain grating around the tub to carry away the water pushed over the edge and he spied, on a tiled shelf, a flower vase devoid of blooms—one of the countless details the Atageini had never properly attended in this room. He took up that antique vase for a pitcher, partially filled it from the tub and poured it over himself as he stood over the drain. He repeated the procedure, sluicing off the worst of the grime, until coming up behind him, Jago took the full vase and poured it over his head.

Both hands free, he raked a twig out of his hair, and laid it on the shelf. A second vaseful followed. He undid his braid, and laid aside the bedraggled, sodden, once-white ribbon. Jago shed her black leathers and boots and tee, and being no cleaner than he was, poured the makeshift pitcher over herself, washing dirt into the drain as the relative chill of the air drove him to the depths of the tub. He submerged, surfaced, embraced by fluid warmth.

“It should be safe for the rest to join us, Jago-ji,” he said. “I have no modesty left.”

“Oh, they will take their turn,” she said. Her black skin showed a few scrapes, a few trails of red film from untreated cuts. Her pigtail, freed of its confines, separated into temporarily curling strands that sent trails of moisture down a broad, strong back, and he watched that beautiful back in absolute satisfaction and enjoyment, rejoicing to see her alive and in one piece. He was, himself, polka-dotted with bruises, with red chafe marks, with scrapes, scratches, and one long raking cut on the leg that was not as painful as the blisters, but it hurt like hell in the water, right along with his splinter-invaded hands.

Still, oh, it was good to duck his head under water, to sink down over his head, and resurface with his nose just above warm, steaming water. He stirred from that bliss, spying bits of straw and twigs that had bobbed to the surface, about to get into the filter. He put them, collected, onto the stone rim, and the next moment his straw bits were awash for a second time as Jago stepped into the bath. She submerged. The water cut itself off, having reached its level, and Jago surfaced, eyes shut, content to sink back against the wall and soak for a moment.

So was he content, blissful, until Tatiseigi’s manservant turned up next to the bath edge with a tall stack of snow-white towels.

“One may put them on the shelf, nadi,” Jago said severely, shocking the man, quite surely—one only hoped he was too embarrassed to report the scene to his lord, but one greatly doubted it.

And at this precise moment, Bren said to himself, he didn’t give a damn what the servants gossiped.

The gentleman of service went back to the door, delicately took a tray from his female fellow-servant standing oh so modestly and properly outside, then came back and set it down on the bath edge.

It held the unguents and oils and linaments Jago had requested. A small box of plasters Timani set above the water-zone, and then stopped dead, staring at Bren’s gun on the shelf on eye level with him. Underwater, next to Bren, Jago had braced a foot—to spring, it might be.

But then, without coming near that deadly object, the manservant slipped out.

“One should not have left that there,” Bren muttered.

“One should not,” Jago agreed: never a syllable of flattery or excuse over a security breach, and likewise she was probably annoyed with herself. Then came the drift of remarks passed outside: Tano, very near the bathroom door, accosted the servants to discuss clothing, clean and otherwise, and the urgent need for shirts and underwear.

“We shall be gossiped about,” Bren muttered. “One deeply apologizes, Jago-ji. Not least about leaving the gun there.”

“Better to be gossiped about,” Jago said, sinking back, “than taken for the furniture, nandi.” A wicked smile chased the frown, and a wink. “That is a true domestic. He is not Guild.”

That was good to know. Meanwhile Jago was close and soap-scented, and in good humor. For a few moments after, just to spite fate and the local gossip, they indulged in conventions some human, some atevi, some common to both, and several things that downright hurt—but about the pain, he didn’t, at the moment, care.

Being alive was good. Being with Jago was glorious. He had intended to spend his bathtime extracting splinters, and dismissed the notion for perhaps ten whole minutes— before they got out to give the others the chance at the tub.

Then he found that the hot water had him dripping blood from that gash he hadn’t thought amounted to much, not to mention the sensation of air hitting the raw spots.

“I shall ruin the towel,” he protested, when she wanted to stop the flow.

“One is very certain, Bren-ji, that the staff has bleach at their disposal.” Jago settled him on the dressing bench and set to work with the bottles the servant had brought in on the tray, some preparations that stung, most that he was glad to find didn’t. She salved spots he wouldn’t have anyone else reach, pulled splinters from his hands, including one quite nasty one on the side of his right hand, and stuck plasters onto several cuts. They were plasters designed for her complexion, not his, in inconspicuous places.

And somewhere in that process the pain greatly eased, pain he’d carried so many hours he hadn’t even realized it, until the steady presence of misery changed to the sting of treatments. He returned the favor on her scratches, rubbed liniment left-handed into her shoulders. They had both become far more pleasantly aromatic than the condition in which they had arrived, and were both towel-wrapped, evergreen-smelling and warm by the time Banichi came in. He laid his own gun on the shelf and claimed the bath, sending water over the side. Then Tano and Algini added themselves to the tub, and the slosh-drain became a vital necessity.

Bren retreated from the flood with Jago and took up watch in the bedroom. There was no bathrobe provided by their host. There was no help with his hair from the servants, but Jago put on most of her uniform and he, wrapped in a luxurious huge towel, plaited Jago’s damp queue while she sat on the floor in front of him, one of the rare times he could persuade her to take precedence, for duty’s sake.

The servants slipped in the front door again. Timani, the man, brought them soap, towels, combs, brushes, and a stack of black uniform shirts, and tried not to notice the impropriety in progress, not looking at Jago nor quite at him.

The two fled back out the door, in haste, and Jago outright laughed at the retreat.

“Hold still,” Bren complained, and replaited the last few turns, which, with her movement, had escaped the half-tied ribbon and his unskilled fingers. His own hair was still wet. When braided, it tended to curl right out of its ribbon, unless very expertly handled.

Hers was always straight and sleek and perfect.

So was she, once she stood up: straight and sleek and perfect, wearing her last uniform tee and black leather pants.

“I shall track down the servants and see what the laundry staff intends to do about your clothes, nandi.”

“And underwear,” he said solemnly. “I am down to the very last.”

He suffered a kiss on the forehead and sat afterward with his eyes closed, listening to Jago put on her coat and leave, listening to the Atageini house elsewhere recovering from last night’s attack, upstairs and down, inside and out. A mecheita in the general direction of the stableyard bawled its complaint at the heavens.

Someone had begun hammering with a vengeance in the last few minutes, two someones, or a strong echo, coming from somewhere inside the house—he thought downstairs, and indeed, they had been moving scaffolding in the foyer. Servants shouted instructions and questions at one another in halls that, before the attack, had been orderly and quiet. This room, unprepared and lacking amenities, was probably one they accorded some village lord’s third son during the seasonal hunts and otherwise never touched. He had a go at plaiting his own hair, with indifferent results. He could by no means tie the ribbon, but he clipped it into a finish.

And he recalled then he was supposed to be guarding the room, and he had left his gun and pocket com on the shelf in the bathroom. He got up and went after the means for self-defense.

“The door opened,” Banichi observed, tilting his head back from his comfortable place in the tub, Tano and Algini having arranged themselves around the other rim.

Atevi hearing. Jago had not been that noisy in her leaving.

“Jago went out to question the staff,” he said, “she says about my wardrobe, but likely about other things, too.”

“The house is full of strangers coming and going, Bren-ji.

Atageini, Taibeni.” A high member of the Atageini house staff having been in Kadagidi employ, it remained a wonder they had not all been murdered in their beds on the first night, if the traitor had once found a way past their personal security. “Your staff earnestly asks you stay away from the doors. If there should be an arrival, even of the servants, immediately duck in here and trust that we shall leave this bath in very rapid fashion.”

“I shall sit far to the inside of the room,” he promised Banichi.

The water around his staff had gone murky. The bathroom smelled of strong evergreen soap. “But the servants have already been here.

Shirts have arrived. One assumes there are enough for all of you, nadiin-ji.”

“Good,” Banichi said, and heaved himself up to his feet, sending tides over the edge. He climbed the ledge, leaving the water to Tano and Algini. “But one does not approve this coming and going of strange servants.”

“Jago was here at the time.” He was mortally sorry to have disturbed Banichi’s bath. “And, Banichi-ji, one is quite sure ill-meaning servants could equally well poison us at dinner or shoot us in the halls—”

“Access,” Banichi said, wrapping a towel about his waist.

“Everything is a question of access and the propriety of the house.

This Timani is vague on the matter of his man’chi, and until someone owns up to him and his partner, we do not allow him—”

The foyer door had opened, not a furtive opening, but a thump. In a single stride Banichi elbowed Bren out of the way, had his gun in hand, and stood to meet an arrival in the bedroom.

“Daja-ma,” Banichi said in dismay.

Bren put his head through the door. Only two women alive rated that “my lady” from Banichi. And the visitor was not the dowager.

It was Damiri. Tabini-aiji’s wife. Mother of the heir. She was resplendent in a silk robe of muted green with the white Atageini lilies. Banichi and he stood there in towels. Her own bodyguard was in attendance, two women in Assassins’ black leather, professionally impassive, standing behind her. Dared one suspect amusement in the lady’s eyes?

“Daja-ma,” Bren said, making his own small bow.

“One trusts the paidhi’s welcome now does credit to my uncle’s house.”

“We have seen two servants,” he said. “Are they yours, daja-ma?”

“They are persons we know, at least,” Damiri said, “They are not Guild, nand’ paidhi, but they are reliable in man’chi to the Atageini house.”

“Then the paidhi-aiji accepts them,” Bren said, “with all confidence and gratitude, daja-ma.”

“Our Ajuri cousins will arrive this evening,” Damiri said, “with additional personnel, most domestic—but not all.” Ajuri was Damiri’s mother’s clan, a small fact from the basement of the paidhi’s knowledge, one he raked up into memory. He had met Damiri’s mother once, at a social occasion: the Ajuri were a small clan to the north of here, a postage stamp of a territory, but a rich one, within Dursai Province, and almost within the Padi Valley.

“Local construction companies are assessing the damage to the house and making urgent repairs,” Damiri said further. “Certain of my husband’s staff have just come in.”

Those would be likely more arrivals from Taiben province, Taibeni clan. Ragi, the aiji’s own clan, by ethnicity, like most of the central regions. “One is extremely glad to hear,” Bren said with a bow of his head. Everything was, on the surface, good news—hasty, too hasty perhaps, the moves of these ordinary citizens arriving as if the skirmish was a single incident, the construction companies coming in as if they were sure the fighting was at least at a long pause, and as if there was no likelihood at all that the Kadagidi would come sweeping in with airplanes and bombs in the next round. He certainly wanted to believe they were safe from further attack. But bombs were not the only danger.

And the arrival of the Ajuri, marginal outsiders to the district, added more than one more clan to what was gathering here; it added intrusion from another association, a situation which, among atevi—given atevi instincts—did not seem to diminish the tension.

Modern atevi didn’t generally fight wars, knowing they were hard to stop. But this situation was widening.

“We have had at least a preliminary report about your voyage, nandi, the things done, things seen. Clearly our son has grown. And learned new things.” There was a mother’s regret in that, he sensed it: two years of her son’s life had passed in which his mother and father had had no part at all. “You did extremely well for him, nand’ Bren. And you risked your life for him, latest. We shall not forget.”

He felt heat in his face. “One made every effort, daja-ma.” She had graciously not added that his influence over the heir had become a serious liability in this backlash of atevi resentment against human influence in the court. “But he is in all respects your son, and acted as he saw fit.” He gave her back a son who’d grown up on The Three Musketeers and shared tea and cakes with an enemy alien. A son who longed for dinosaurs and devoured pizza with a circle of human playmates. All these innocent passions had become a liability to the boy and a puzzlement to his parents.

“We have heard things here and there,” Damiri said, “that you did at great risk. Things the aishidi’tat must know, nandi.”

Support. But he needed it not only for his own sake. He needed desperately to make things understood, and he seized on it, perhaps too recklessly. “We hope to give a wider report, daja-ma.” With thoughts of the computer lying in its concealment. “We have evidence. We have profound reasons to argue that your husband must be the one in authority.”

“Our confidence in you is justified,” Damiri said, not a yes and not a no. She added, in a pragmatic vein, “Anything that you may require, nandi, ask of Timani.”

Timani. Whom they had deeply and deliberately shocked. God, Bren thought. And that act of his might reach the lady’s ears, if staff gossip had not embroidered it already.

“Thank you. Our deep gratitude, daja-ma.”

She gave a little nod, then turned, gathering her own bodyguard, and left.

This was the house in which she had spent her growing years, in which her Atageini father had died, assassinated. It was the house in which she, a minor child, had come under her great-uncle Tatiseigi’s governance—and played childish pranks, so one had heard, faintly. It was a tradition her son had certainly carried on.

She was not the lady of the house; she was somewhat greater in power, or had been, until the overthrow.

And every keen golden glance of her eyes had surely noted the deficiencies of her great-uncle’s hospitality to a visiting human. He had a feeling that a list was accumulating, between the lady and Timani and Adaro, not least of which must be the lack of separate bedrooms and bath for female staff which the old lord had clearly known was in the party—from that major detail down to the lack of a message tray in the foyer, the sun-fading and mustiness of the bedspread, not to mention the drapes, which had rips in the lining through which the afternoon sun shone in patches, with a few more rents in the rotten, dusty fabric since bullets had come flying past last night. He was sure the suite the aiji occupied and that accorded to the dowager and to the heir were immaculate and kabiu—but the paidhi-aiji had been tucked into a room unrefurbished for, oh, two or three decades, if not a century or so.

“I fear I was very indiscreet,” he muttered to Banichi, who, towel and all, had never acted for a moment as if he were caught at a disadvantage.

“One is sure the aiji’s consort is very well aware of your personal arrangement.”

Could he blush any hotter? “The servants will tell it through the staff, Banichi-ji. It will reflect on Jago and one fears it will reflect on the consort. Clearly, association with me is bad enough without—”

“Do you think you have to cause to be ashamed, paidhi-ji? Do you think you have any reason at all to hide? The discredit is Lord Tatiseigi’s, not yours.”

He looked up at a man who had cast his lot with him for good or for ill for more than a decade, and whose man’chi would, he was sure, last to the end. Like Jago’s. Like Tano’s, and Algini’s, and so many othersc it was absolute.

“I shall try to deserve you,” he said with a small catch in the throat at that moment, and probably embarrassed Banichi and greatly upset the order of Banichi’s universe into the bargain, but he didn’t stay to debate his human improprieties, only went to find his change of linen, at least, until Timani and his partner might bring him clothes proper to wear for the remainder of the day. He was still intensely embarrassed at his lapse of judgment, his small fling at an insulting reception. It was going to be an effort to face Timani, let alone the rest of the household staff. They had been sent, Timani had said; the man had made no mention of Damiri.

But they were a loan Damiri had specifically engineered, a gift bestowed on him, and he had not done well, not in the least, at a time when his judgment was already questioned in far larger matters, in all the advice he had ever given. He had been in space too long. He had forgotten the ways of the court and the great houses. He had lost touch, was what. And he had to relocate himself in old habits, and mend his rebellious thinking, fastc his position advised decorous quiet, and cleverness, and he had been neither quiet nor clever this afternoon.

Banichi meanwhile took black shirts and linen from the closet and went back to the bath. Bren had time to dress, at least far enough to preserve decency under the towel, before the outer door opened, and Timani, indeed, and Adaro with him, arrived bearing his remaining shirt, his coat, his trousers, everything immaculately pressed, besides, in Adaro’s hands, a vase of seasonal branches, bare with autumn, whether arranged for them or hastily snatched from some hallway.

“One is ever so grateful, nadiin,” he said, newly respectful and grateful for their help. He bowed. They bowed. Adaro unburdened her hands, set the vase on a bare table, and began energetically stripping the bed, while Timani hung his clothes in the closet.

“Additional staff will come and go, by your leave, nandi,” Adaro said, “supplying items that may have been mislaid, including fresh linens and towels. We shall introduce them properly to your security, but if you have any question at all, we will stay close by while they are in this room.”

“One is extremely appreciative,” he said, thinking that he ought to relocate the computer if they were restocking the linen cabinet, and if servants would be going through it; and to Timani, somewhat meekly: “Will you assist me to dress, nadi?”

To dress appropriately for the day, that was, in this tag end of the afternoon—to braid his hair properly, to look civilized, and to begin to act it.

2

Left to his own desires for the day he would have gone to bed, burrowed deep, and stayed there for the next week, but he had settled on one urgent objective for the rest of the day, since he had seen Damiri was well-disposed: He wanted above all things to get his report to Tabini, and not to offend Tatiseigi in the process. In order to do that, he was obliged to appear at best advantage, respectful of the house and the persons he dealt with—and he had to manage not to offend the staff in the process.

Adaro had occupied herself discreetly about the bed-making.

Timani assisted his dressing, and held the shirt for him, frowning the while—doubtless Timani had never hoped to see a skinny, scratched, and bruised human at such close quarters. Bren was accustomed to a certain curiosity, but given all that had transpired, he was no more comfortable than the servants.

“Forgive me, nandi,” Timani said, settling the shirt onto his shoulders, on which black bandage patches were in evidence, not to mention the long gash on his arm, also done up in a series of black bandages. “Would medical attention not be in order?”

“My staff has put me back together well enough,” he said, and attempted humor with the earnest fellow. “None of these was the mecheita’s fault. Except the fence.”

Stiff and proper. “Nevertheless, nandi, if the paidhi or his staff needs any professional assistance—”

“I hope we shall not, nadi. More plasters, perhaps, for them.” He attempted his own buttons, with fingers broken-nailed and needing a file, and Timani hastened to take over before his splinter wounds left a blood spot on the linen.

The queue was redone and the white ribbon, pressed, though frayed and warped, went into its proper bow. The boots went on, polished and with the scuffs gone, even the broken seam somehow pulled back into line and repaired. Meanwhile other servants came in with more bed linens and more draperies for the windows, as well as two more massive porcelain vases of a fine pale green. The latter were precious things, older than the Association itself, very likely, and marked a definite turn in the attention given the paidhi in this house.

He sat down under a pretense of reading, quietly took a nail file from his personal kit, and repaired the damage, which tended to snag his trousers, a lord genteely idle and proper while the staff worked.

Then, in a momentary absence of the staff, he sprang up and relocated the computer, in its inconspicuous hard case, to a place with his staff’s heavier weaponry in other hard cases and canvas bags, where it looked fairly well at home at a casual glance. A battalion of servants came in with ladders next. The new drapes were hung, meticulously adjusted, tables moved about, vases set just so, as an elderly man, a master of kabiu, one had no doubt, arrived, supervised, then left, as satisfied as it was possible to be with an awkward situation. Lord Tatiseigi change his lodgings to something more fit? Admit he had been churlish? A thousand times no.

Patch the situation until Lady Damiri was mollified? Perhaps.

In half an hour, the whole room shifted from sterile and minimal to a heartwarmingly fresh arrangement: Welcome, it began to say.

Honored guest of the Ragi court, it began to say, in the inclusion of small black and red items, the heraldry of Taibini’s house, arranged as slight accents within the green and white and gold of the Atageini heraldry. Welcome to the paidhi-aiji, the room even began to say, in the white vase now set beside the bed, holding the green and gold and subtler antique white of the Atageini lilies—the arrangement was a little ad hoc, and seasonally questionable, but it spoke volumes about a revised staff attitude.

Meanwhile the nicely pressed coat went on, the lace cuffs and collar were meticulously adjusted, while hammering and sawing reached a frenzy elsewhere in the house.

“One is extremely pleased, nadi,” Bren murmured, looking about him, and letting a breath go in a deep sigh, within the comforting, rib-brushing confines of a clean and immaculate coat. “Your efforts are much appreciated.”

“With gratitude, nand’ paidhi. Will we two suffice for your service? I shall take up residence in the foyer, and Adaro wherever the woman sleeps.”

Well, and damn the prickly propriety of this house, which he had previously gone over the line to offend, no question. Now he had to appease their sensibilities, in their best efforts to put a patch on their own lord’s discourtesy to a guest. “That does pose an unaccustomed problem, nadi,” he said. “We by no means wish the female member of our staff too far separated from her fellows, or from her duty. This is her wish, and mine, and it takes priority above all else.”

“Then Adaro and I shall contrive an arrangement in the foyer, nandi, if screens will suffice in this room.”

“One has every confidence,” he said. “Continue as needed. Thank you.”

Damn it, damn it, damn it—he slept ever so much better when Jago was in the bed, but things were as they were, and he was the one responsible for pushing the situation.

And now, if he had Damiri’s ear, he had no time to spend on ordering their sleeping arrangements. He had other things to do, urgently, beginning with securing an audience.

At times one so missed Gin’s human, shocking style of summons—but Hey, Jerry! would be a two century scandal under this roof.

One daren’t. But it was perfectly reasonable to ask Timani to walk ten steps to advise Banichi, dressing in the bath, that the lord-of-household needed a Guild messenger in formal uniform to walk thirty paces down the outside hall to advise the aiji’s staff to advise the aiji that the paidhi would like to walk that same thirty paces to sit down for a small, hour-long tea and eventually deliver a critical report to the aiji, face to face, oh, sometime reasonably soon.

“Ask Banichi to see me, nadi,” was how the routine began, and when Banichi came out of the bath—only his leathers newly polished, doubtless to the detriment of a couple of towels, his queue in good order—in short, ready to face the rest of the day—“An errand, Banichi-ji.”

“Nandi?”

“One never once thought to advance the matter with the consort, Banichi-ji—and doubtless the aiji is due his rest— One ever so greatly regrets the haste, and understands the delicacy of asking so urgently—but under all circumstances, certainly the aiji will wish to hear my report as soon as possible.”

It was ordinarily a tranquil, gracious routine of inquiry, staff approaching staff, arranging things in back corridors that doubtless existed for the suites in this grand hall, but not for this modest room. The attempt at formal inquiry and request of an audience lost a little more graciousness with the house ringing with hammers and voices of staff hurrying about in a mad rush. Shouts at that moment echoed in the hall outside.

“Yes,” Banichi said, with the same economy of motion, and completely understanding him.

Shortcuts. No laborious use of seals and exchange of message-cylinders, which he still lacked, a circumstance which could render a gentleman near incommunicado. He instead hoped to gain the aiji’s summons to him, approaching Tabini via the security network, disgraceful shortcut, for what had become an ungracious, breakneck situation under Lord Tatiseigi’s oh so proper roof. But one did as one could. Banichi immediately slipped away and out to the hall, sans written message, and was gone long enough for Bren to wonder where Jago was at the moment, and to look cautiously out the window to investigate one source of the hammering.

The repair of the stableyard’s eastern gate seemed to be the focus of a great deal of activity. Never mind the stable behind it had burned down. They needed fences to give the Atageini mecheiti a sense of territory, to keep them from challenging the Taibeni mecheiti—if one of the big bulls took it into his thick skull to start a fight, it could be very nasty indeed. At the moment, presumably, the hedges kept them apart, but those barriers only lasted until a mecheita decided to walk on through.

Jago came back.

He looked at her, lifted a brow in mild question regarding her business.

“One delayed, consulting with Cenedi,” Jago said.

“How is the dowager?”

“Quite well, nandi, though Cenedi himself is suffering somewhat.”

“Wounded?” He had not heard that.

“Minor, but an impairment in hand-to-hand. We discussed alternatives. Places of refuge to which we might retreat, if things grow chancy. One has a rather better notion of alignments in the region—some business the dowager gathered from her grandson.”

A very useful conference between those two, then. A notion how the political map lay, and what doors might welcome them, and what ones would not, as a next step after Atageini territory. But this was not a staff that liked the word retreat.

“One rather hopes the Kadagidi would have reconsidered their reception here,” he said, ”and at least delay for consultations.”

Consultations with their lord Murini, who was still sitting in Shejidan, at their last report, while his clan went at it hammer and tongs with the previously neutral Atageinic and now had outsiders coming in. Provoking a region-wide war ought to require at least some consultation with the self-proclaimed aiji.

“Couriers may have gone to the capital,” Jago said.

“Unfortunately, though the Kadagidi had an agent here, Lord Tatiseigi does not seem to have had particular success at installing his own among the Kadagidi.”

Of course not, Bren thought. Tatiseigi had spent all his best men infiltrating the paidhi’s household—and very good men, too, not to mention a better cook than he could otherwise have found. He was the great threat Tatiseigi had been keeping an eye on, not the neighboring clan who had been plotting against the stability of the aishidi’tat for as long as that entity had existed.

“One wishes we knew what would be the wise thing, Jago-ji.

Staying here much longer seems rash. The servants, however— Damiri-daja has affirmed she sent them.”

“So Cenedi said.”

“Damiri says Ajuri clan is coming in—for a familial visit in crisis, one supposes. And all the farmers and townsfolk out there arriving and picnicking, as if it were a local harvest fair— one worries about this situation, Jago-ji. One is very concerned for their safety.”

“Well we should,” Jago said. “But, understand, it makes a statement—one does wish you would stay farther from the window, Bren-ji.”

He moved. Instantly.

“The servants intend to install privacy screens,” he offered.

“Perhaps we should add them to the windows.”

A rich, soft chuckle. “Privacy screens indeed. After what the gentleman saw in the bath, nandi?”

“I greatly regret the embarrassment, Jago-ji,” he said. “I profoundly apologize.”

“For what possible offense, Bren-ji? And privation will not last.

Likely we shall indeed be leaving soon.”

“Where?”

“One can only guess,” Jago said. “As for the harvest fair out on the lawn, clearly the lord has encouraged it. He has met with these locals. He has praised them. He has sent out word.”

“Is that from Cenedi?”

“It might be.” The Guild kept its secrets. “Clearly Lord Tatiseigi wishes to rally the clans and meet his neighbors in force if they come in. Tabini-aiji has choices to make.”

“God.” The last in Mosphei’, but Jago understood him. Tatiseigi, whose equipment had nearly gotten them all killed, proposed to raise local war against the clan whose lord claimed Tabini’s office, pushing the aiji to move now or move on. “I have to talk to Tabini while we still have some means to print a file. I just sent Banichi to reach him.”

“Banichi was going downstairs.”

“Downstairs?” To find Tabini’s senior staff, was it?

Then Tabini was in conference, or his staff was, with Tatiseigi or his household. Perhaps Tabini was trying to talk Tatiseigi out of provoking a second round with the Kadagidi while things were still within the realm of negotiation and finesse.

The faint thrum of an engine, meanwhile, had barely intruded into his awareness. He had thought at first it was another bus coming up the front drive.

Then it seemed more like something else. And Jago had heard it, clearly. She seized his arm.

“An airplane, nandi.”

Air attack. She wanted to pull him to cover. His heart doubled its beats. “My computer. Above all else, my computer.”

He broke away and rushed to get it, Jago right on his heels, and when he had it she seized up a heavy bag from the same stack: armament. Tano and Algini dived in, arming themselves likewise.

The plane buzzed over the roof to a rattle of small arms fire.

No bombs dropped. The plane flew away and sounded as if it reached a limit and perhaps turned to come back somewhere over the east meadow.

“That plane came from the west,” he said; the west was not from the Kadigidi side of things. And since the engine sound was still far away, he darted back out of the bath to risk a quick look from the window, Jago and Tano and Algini in anxious attendance.

It was a very small plane, a three-seater at most. It looked to be landing on the broad meadow of the eastern mecheita pasture. Its fuselage was yellow striped with blue.

“Dur!” he exclaimed, seeing those colors, remembering a young and determined pilot who had scared the hell out of a scheduled airliner. “Jago-ji, come with me! Tano! Algini! Call security! Stop them from shooting at that plane!”

He was still encumbered with his computer. He ran back and shoved it into the pile of baggage, not even knowing whether the landing had succeeded against the small arms fire that renewed itself. He headed straight for his foyer and the door of the suite, ahead of Jago, for once. She overtook him, seized his arm with one hand, and opened that door to the outer hall, by no means stopping him, but not letting him dash recklessly ahead of her.

“Tano is calling Banichi,” she said, as they walked double-time down the upstairs hall toward the stairs. They were alone in the upper hallway—servants might have ducked for cover or run to windows within unoccupied rooms, but there was no sign of anyone as they reached the stairs and hurried down.

There was a broad landing in front of the foyer, the juncture of the main floor and the stairs that led outside, a region now the domain of workmen setting up scaffolding and repairing the outer doors. As they arrived the door to the adjacent drawing room opened, and Tabini-aiji himself strode out through the collection of Guild security that ordinarily guarded the doors of any conference in progress—the aiji was in Assassins’ black, still, with an identifying red scarf around his arm, much as he had appeared when he had turned up last night, if less dusty.

Elderly Lord Tatiseigi, in muted pastel green with abundant lace, accompanied him out, looking entirely vexed with the proceedings.

Banichi exited the room with them, pocket com in hand.

“They must not shoot!” Bren said at once. “The colors of the plane are yellow and blue! They are Dur!”

“In my winter pasturage!” Tatiseigi cried.

“See to its protection,” Tabini said to staff. “Quickly!”

Bren himself veered for the foyer and ran down the steps under the scaffolding to the massive front doors, while workmen who had stopped their cleanup and repair stared at the sudden commotion.

With Jago and now Banichi in close company, and right behind Tabini’s own head of security, he exited the house onto the wide front steps, above a clutter of buses and farm trucks that now jammed the hedge-rimmed drive. Ordinary townsmen had taken cover from the overflight behind the flimsy cover of vehicles, armed and waiting with their pistols and hunting rifles.

“This may be an ally that has landed!” Bren shouted at the nearest. “Pass the word, nadiin! The colors are the island of Dur!”

And to Banichi and Jago: “Make sure no one fires, nadiin-ji.”

“Go,” Banichi said to Jago, and Jago dived among the cars and beyond, leaving them behind. By the way heads came up over fenders and truck beds in her wake, she was passing the word as she went, not relying on word of mouth.

Bren’s desire was to take off and run flat out toward the plane in the meadow before some accident intervened but a lord ought not to breach dignity; a lord, in view of strangers, was held to, at most, a brisk walk, and necessarily Banichi stayed close by him, armed and formidable, and making their way just behind Tabini’s man. Armed gawkers jumped back out of the path of black-uniformed Guild, and a handful of mounted Taibeni rangers that had ridden through the hedges to get over to this path fell in behind him, mecheiti snorting and fussing at being reined in, another reason to want to hurry the pace.

Down the side of the house, along what had been the stable path so long as the house had had a stable, past the ongoing fence repair, and around to the east meadow, where Bren caught a good view of a handful of rifle-bearing house security behind a low stone wall, holding a vantage on the sloping meadow beyond. Engine noise had sunk in volume. The small plane was taxiing in the middle of Tatiseigi’s pasture.

He still was constrained not to run. He walked, walked with that mandated dignity that lent calm to a volatile situation. That, as much as the radioed orders, made it less and less likely that some agitated townsman behind him would take a shot at the pilot as he climbed out. He walked, with Banichi, beyond the gateless stone wall and the spectators, walked over the cultivated pasture, a beloved patch of fine graze that had already suffered trampling, vehicular traffic, and fire last night. On the lowest flat, the plane came rolling to a stop.

Jago caught up with them as they came within hailing distance of the plane, and only at that point did cold second thoughts rush in. What if he were in fact mistaken about the color pattern? What if loyal Dur had turned against Tabini along with so many others?

A thousand doubts—a human could be mistaken in his assumptions, here in the heart of atevi feuds and upheaval.

But the door of the little plane banged open and the young pilot climbed up onto the wing, a silhouette against the bright fuselage, carrying his coat on his arm. He jumped down with that boundless enthusiasm that was the very signature of the young man Bren remembered.

He wanted to run up and hug the boy for very joy. But Jago had gone forward to meet the lad, and the young pilot came walking back toward them, putting on his formal coat in the process—a rich azure blue, it was.

And once he had his arms in the sleeves, the young gentleman, dignity to the winds, set out toward them at a moderate jog, letting Jago follow at a more deliberate pace.

“Bren-nandi!”

It was Rejiri of Dur, no doubt in the world, and when they met, Rejiri seized Bren by the arms just to look at him—a young man now, no boy, and he had grown half a foot; but his eyes were as bright, as blithe as ever. “Back from space, nandi! What an excellent, auspicious day!”

“Nandi-ji,” Bren saluted the young man, carried back to far happier times. Rejiri had stayed steadfast. The planet still turned on its axis.

“Dur is coming in,” Rejiri said breathlessly. “My father has sent a hundred thirty-two of the clan here, with our bodyguards, arriving by train this evening, to support the aiji!”

God, another clan to support the aiji, this one from the coast—as if Tabini had joined in with Tatiseigi’s crazed notion of going to war against the Kadagidi. The wiser course for the aiji was certainly to fade back into the hills and conduct a far more reasoned assault on the Kadagidi, with organization and pressure levied against the capital. Such wild enthusiam beamed out at him; and the boy from Dur, now a towering, broad-shouldered young man—Rejiri could not take the train with the ordinary folk of his clan, oh, no. He had had to make a dangerous, officially forbidden flight and execute a landing in the middle of Tatiseigi’s winter pasture, all to convey the news of Dur’s intentions—and have himself right into the thick of things long before clan authority arrived.

Not a hair of the youth was changed.

“You are our good luck, Rejiri-ji,” Bren declared. “You are ever so welcome.”

“Not just Dur, but our neighbors the Tagi and the Mairi are coming, too!” Rejiri said. And before Bren could muster any rational objection that the aiji himself might be taking off elsewhere, to a safer vantage—“And Banichi and Jago! Good to see you in good health, nadiin-ji! You look not a bit changed. Did you rescue the stranded humans? Did you see wonders out there?”

“We did both, nandi,” Banichi said. “But nand’ Bren will tell you that, in much greater detail.”

By now the row of onlookers back at the ruined fence had doubled in size, spectators gathered there, while on every floor of the house, multiple heads had appeared in every window facing the meadow.

“You will indeed tell us the whole adventure,” Rejiri said— words, with Rejiri, always flowed like quicksilver, affording no time for organization, no opportunity, sometimes, for basic common sense.

“We look forward to hearing it, every bit. And might there be tea, nand’ Bren? Intercede for me with Lord Tatiseigi. Might I prevail upon your good offices to do so? One does apologize profoundly for the tracks in his meadow. It has rained here, has it not? I felt the tires resist as I came in. And is there a chance one may see the aiji?

He is here, is he not? It is true, surely?”

All this in his first few steps toward the house.

“The aiji is indeed here, nandi-ji. In very fact, I was preparing to seek an audience with him and with Lord Tatiseigi when we heard your plane pass overc”

“Oh, excellent! It was good weather for flying, an entirely auspicious day, as I told my father when I set out. Clear skies made me just a little worried, in case, of course, these wretches should send up planes of their own, which one doubted they would dare, even so, over Atageini air space—but the heir to Dur has a perfect right to fly where he likes over the northern associations, does he not, nandi? Certainly he has!”

“Is the north that fragmented, that one speaks only of the local associations?”

“Oh, you have scarcely heard the list of outrages, nand’ Bren! The so-named aiji has made flight regulations, laws, rules, and taxes, all of which Dur refuses to countenance. We despise his laws and his tax collectors!”

“And does your father stand in good health?”

“Oh, extremely, extremely. Do you know, I have two new sisters!”

“Twins, Rejiri-ji?”

“No, no, a new marriage. The girls were born in successive years.

Beautiful little sprites. My mother swears she is quite jealous, except I am indisputably the eldest, and papa is indisputably connected to her, and has treaty ties to her house which he will never break. My mother is Drisi-Edi, you know. And the Edi may well send forces here, too. I would be surprised if not. Have you seen Lord Geigi? Did he come down with you?”

Atevi marriage went by contracts, for thus and such number of years. The Edi were one of the coastal peoples, allied to Lord Geigi’s people. And, my God, Bren thought, mentally reeling from the zigzag course of information: Geigi’s province? His people were leaving their sanctuary to throw in their lot with Tatiseigi and Dur?

“Lord Geigi remains on the station,” he managed to say. “He remains in excellent health, and maintains close control over matters on the station. Jase-paidhi is back, safe and sound, and he will assist Lord Geigi. Mercheson-paidhi, too, is safe on Mospheira, in close harmony with the Presidenta as well as with the ship-aijiin aloft.”

“We have had news of the mainland from the radio, nand’ paidhi!

From your university.”

Was that how rumor was reaching epidemic proportions? Radio, from across the strait?

“What did they say?”

“Oh, that the shuttle is preparing a return, that the legislature is passing a resolution of support for Tabini-aiji and for the station-aijiin, that the Presidenta has urged citizens along the coast to keep a sharp watch and report any untoward intrusion.”

Aimed at the shuttle, it might be. One could only dread what might happen to the two others, here on the mainland.

“And do they know where Tabini-aiji is, Jiri-ji?”

“One remains unsure. It was never mentioned. But we heard. A car came to us, from Meiri. They had heard, because a Meiri woman has a son with the chief accountant of Ceigac”

Which was an Atageini town. Which meant rumors had been flying at record speed, a veritable network sending out word, possibly starting with Tatiseigi’s leaky communications system.

Rejiri went into detail as they passed through the ranks of wondering spectators, no few of whom were house security, and nonstop as they walked up and around the side of the house, Rejiri asking a barrage of questions all the way—had the voyage been successful? What strange sights had he seen?

Then onto the drive, where town buses and farm trucks vied for parking space.

“Taiben has come in,” Bren thought to inform him.

“Taiben! Then they are the mecheita-camp!”

“Indeed.”

“Now that is a wonder,” Rejiri pronounced this partnership of Atageini and Taibeni, and, casting his gaze up to the top of the steps that confronted them, he climbed energetically, security trailing them, house security standing at the top of the steps to confront and challenge them.

“The young lord of Dur,” Banichi said as they approached that cautious line, “come to confer with Lord Tatiseigi.” Oh, that Lord Tatiseigi was politic. Opposition immediately gave way.

“Our lord will see the visitor in the sitting room, nadi,” the seniormost of Tatiseigi’s security informed them, and doors immediately opened and staff folded in with them, past the scaffolding and repair work insidec up those steps, then, and onto the level of the sitting room. To judge by the collection of various bodyguards standing about that door, Tabini, Tatiseigi, and the dowager had gone back into conference in that room; and if one could judge by the Taibeni present, Keimi of Taiben was inside, and likely a couple of Atageini mayors, granted a couple of clerkish types in the mix.

And now another pair of participants arrived, racing down the stairs from the rooms above: Cajeiri, eight years old, as tall as a grown human, and accompanied by one Jegari, his young Taibeni guard.

“Did he fly the plane, nandi?” echoed and re-echoed in the stairwell, and Bren paused to introduce the aiji’s son to the son of the lord of Dur.

“Nandi,” Rejiri said, with a grand and sweeping bow to the boy, and Cajeiri likewise bowed, clearly entranced by the daring landing, the young pilot, and the brightly painted plane out on the meadow—doubtless estimating that if other young lords could do such a reckless thing, he could do it: One had only to know him to imagine the gears turning in his young head.

But by then the drawing room door had opened, and security inside had taken a look, exchanged words with security outside, and questions from the assembled lords were bound to come out to them if they did not now go inside quickly.

“Nandiin,” Bren said, and ushered Cajeiri and Rejiri both into the room.

Tabini-aiji sat at the center of the arc of chairs inside, with Damiri and the dowager on either hand, with Lord Tatiseigi. The young lord of Dur, facing the aiji that the news services under Murini’s control had claimed for months was dead and lost, bowed profoundly, as Cajeiri piped up with, “This is Rejiri, the lord of Dur’s son, nandiin! He landed just outside!”

“Aijin-ma,” Rejiri said in modest grace. “Nand’ dowager.”

Welcome was a little less certain on Lord Tatiseigi’s face— his age-seamed lips disapproved any commotion in his meadows, any further destruction of his lawn. Others present, Keimi of Taiben, and, yes, two Atageini mayors, to judge by their pale green and gold lapel rosettes, remained impassive, offering that inscrutable face one presented to strangers.

“Nand’ Rejiri,” Bren said, “reports himself in advance of his father’s associates, arriving by train this evening from the coast.”

“He landed right at the bottom of the hill,” Cajeiri said, unchecked, and improving the account, “right on the grass. We saw him, and he flew the plane himself!”

“Did he?” Tabini-aiji surely recalled a general chaos in air traffic control, in the very heart of the association, in which this particular plane had been involved, when the young pilot had made his first visit to the capital. But he rose from his chair and welcomed the young lord with extreme warmth. “Loyal, and arrived to join us, and the lord of Dur with him. Who could doubt Dur’s man’chi?”

“Is he prepared to fight?” Tatiseigi asked dourly, still seated in the privilege of age, though most had risen and now settled back again. “With that great noisemaker? Nevertheless we welcome the young lord from Dur. Well, well, welcome, Dur. We shall offer every hospitality. We shall have a go at those miscreants across our border, teach them to observe our hedgesc”

“And how are things on the north coast, young sir?” Ilisidi asked sweetly from her seat, neatly cutting Tatiseigi off.

Another bow, deep and gracious, in that direction. “Free, aiji-ma, free and unshaken—only awaiting the real aiji’s summons.”

Summons, had it been? Bren, having found a vacant chair at the end of the arc, darted a sharp look at Tabini, who said nothing to deny such a summons had gone out.

A summons. Aircraft. People arriving by train. The Ajuri coming in this evening—relatives, and intimately concerned with their daughter Damiri. And now there was talk of Edi coming in. All this motion and commotion suggested that he had been wrong in his estimations. The thought that the aiji and his men could somehow melt back into the woods seemed less and less practical. Clearly the paidhi had not quite gotten the picture until now: He was not sure that Lord Tatiseigi entirely had it yet, but that word summons rang like a bell. Tabini was not here simply to meet the dowager and reclaim his son.

They sat here in the open now. And Atageini had become involved to the hilt. Taibeni had come in. The Ajuri were coming to their defense, and Dur, and others from the coast, if there was a bus left at the railhead to get them here this evening. Or worse, they might have to fight their way in past Kadagidi agents, if the attack renewed itself at dusk.

“There might be trouble at the train station, nandiin,” Bren said quietly, aware it was by no means the paidhi’s job to give the aiji defensive advice, but he lacked information: He wanted someone to think of these things, and let him know what in all hell the aiji was planning. “We removed a bus and left it in Taiben. One is by no means sure there are enough buses left at the station to serve.”

“An excellent point,” Keimi said: The bus in question was still capable of being moved, if Taiben could send it back.

“My father and his guard are armed,” Rejiri said, with a gesture toward the outside. “And there are plenty of buses and trucks here to bring them, nandiin.”

There were certainly plenty of Atageini vehicles which Tatiseigi might not particularly want shot full of holes but neither did they want their allies shot full of holes getting here, it was easier to move a few of them by the shorter, open country road.

“We can send buses,” Tabini said decisively, without so much as a glance at Tatiseigi, who sat glumly chewing his lip and perhaps recalculating the shooting match he was planning with his neighbors. “But the Kadagidi may have moved on the station.”

“One could take the plane up,” Cajeiri suggested, “and see what the Kadagidi are doing.”

Leave it to Cajeiri to think how to get that plane involved in the commotion.

“A dangerous venture,” Damiri said.

“But perhaps a useful one,” Rejiri said. “Aijiin-ma, one would gladly undertake it, observing all possible discretion, but the plane needs fuel.”

“What sort of fuel does it use?” Tabini asked.

It used what the trucks and buses used, it turned out.

“There must be a fuel station in the nearest town,” Rejiri said.

“The estate has its own tank,” Tatiseigi volunteered glumly, wonder of wonders. “And if we refuel this machine, you will keep an eye to the east, young sir, and advise us by radio what you see from up there, before nightfall.” A vague wave of the elderly hand, outer space and the air corridors being likely the same thing in Tatiseigi’s concept. “There may be a use for this thing.”

“By all means, nandi!” Rejiri said. All this meeting and conversation had left the new arrival standing practically in the doorway, assaulted with observations and questions with no time at all taken for tea or consultation—an outrageous haste by atevi standards. One could all but hear Ilisidi say, the thousandth reminder to Cajeiri, that gentlemen did their conversing seated.

But Rejiri was difficult to keep still and no one had insisted on tea.

And with very little more than that exchange of words, the young lord of Dur declared he would go fuel his plane immediately—if the lords would be so gracious as to give him leave to do that.

“My staff will assist, young Dur,” Tatiseigi declared, with a wave of his hand, and that unseemly haste was that. Off went the young lord of Dur with several of Lord Tatiseigi’s servants trailing him from the doorway, bound outside to provide the fuel, one supposed.

“Certainly a very forceful young gentleman,” Lord Tatiseigi said, as if a hurricane had just blown through the hall; and: “Tea, nadiin!” No nadiin-ji for his servants, not from this stiffly formal lord, an elderly gentleman who looked quite harried, quite disturbed, and, like all of them, very short of sleep. Tatiseigi might not be up with the times in technology, but very few had ever outfigured him in politics, and perhaps he, too, was rearranging his concept of Tabini’s intentions—all the while muttering: “Looking over neighbors’ borders. Buzzing over roofs. Not even time to sit down in decency to consult. Can a rifle shot possibly do damage to such a machine?”

“It can,” Tabini said. “And the young man very well knows it, one is quite sure. No, no tea for us, nandi. We are inundated with tea.

Lunch, however, would be welcome.”

“Indeed,” Tatiseigi said, clearly rattled, unaccustomed to being ordered in his own hall.

And somewhere in the swirl of servants and security in the general area, Cajeiri had left his chair, and was nowhere in the room. Bren became aware of it, leaped up and went to the door, where Banichi and Jago waited with the rest of the bodyguards.

“Cajeiri,” he said abruptly. “Banichi-ji.” That was all.

“Yes,” Banichi said crisply, and immediately left, doubtless having known the boy had left, and needing only an instruction.

No possible doubt where the boy had gone. To watch fuel being pumped into the plane. To watch buses rallied for a run to the train station, and—thank God he was with his young bodyguard—to be underfoot in all possible operations.

“Tell Cenedi,” Ilisidi said from her chair, cane poised before her, “that my great-grandson should not go within stone’s throw of that plane.”

“Cenedi-ji.” Bren was the one nearest the door. Cenedi, salt-and-pepper haired as his lady, was also among the bodyguards outside.

“One hears,” Cenedi said without his saying a thing, and left on the same mission as Banichi, to be absolutely sure where Cajeiri was when buses left or when planes took off.

Bren turned back to the room, somewhat easier about the boy, and realizing only then that he and the dowager had both just leaped into order-giving regarding the aiji’s own son, in the aiji’s and the consort’s presence and in front of witnesses.

Habit. Two years of habit. He was mortified.

Tabini wore the faintest of considering looks, and Damiri offered no expression at all. Bren gave a little bow, knowing that what he and the dowager knew about the boy’s habits and inclinations his own father and mother could only guess at this point, and the middle of Tatiseigi’s drawing room was no place to discuss the heir’s failings. They should have done what they had done; he only wished he could have been subtler.

Meanwhile at Rejiri’s urging, buses and trucks would be loading up with armed guards, themselves likely refueling and moving around out there, one could only assume. He took his seat again with the conviction that Banichi and Cenedi would keep the boy out from under the wheels. The plane would go up, and at least one bus or truck would go off into Taiben, to approach the train station, to come back this evening loaded with forces from Durc God knew how or when Ajuri planned to arrive, but things were definitely cooking here.

They only had to hope, in the process, that their unasked air support wandering the skies near Kadagidi territory didn’t provoke an answering escalation from the other side—take a look to the eastern border, indeed. A damned dangerous look, and, considering what he suspected Tabini was setting up here, and what the Kadagidi might be preparing to counter him, he worried about it going wrong.

But he wanted that information, too. He had spent two years and more in a transparent universe where people couldn’t sneak about behind bushes or hide behind hills. He longed to go outside and ask for current information from Tatiseigi’s Guild staff, who might more likely know what movements were happening on the other side—but in the same way farmers weren’t supposed to get involved in lords’ disputes, lords weren’t supposed to meddle in security.

He’d formed some disgraceful habits in the long voyage, he decided, impulses that had flung him out of his seat and after the boy, and habits proper gentlemen might consider far more pernicious than ordering the aiji’s heir about. He’d gotten the very dangerous habit of involving himself in his own security’s affairs, and the very fact that he wanted to be out there right now, giving advice and getting it, where the paidhi flatly didn’t belong—that was a habit he had to break, a shocking breach, for outsiders, doubtless an embarrassment to his own staff.

No matter that Lord Tatiseigi, the least qualified person to be giving orders in that department, was laying down his own set of priorities left and right, including repairs to the foyer, repair and rewiring of outmoded devices in his hedges, and rebuilding the mecheita pen, which would divert hands from more useful occupations.

But Tabini, meanwhile, was up to something entirely deliberate, something that had clearly had time to draw people clear from the coast, and had not yet heard his report. From his vantage at the end of the arc of chairs, he cast Tabini a desperate look and failed to make eye contact—possibly Tabini was ignoring him after that last embarrassment, was reminding him to observe protocols. Clearly the aiji had things better in hand and much farther advanced than he had known.

“Aiji-ma, aijiin-ma,” he asked, clearing his throat, desperate for one critical piece of knowledge, “may one ask—shall we indeed stay here tonight?”

“It seems so,” Tabini said placidly. “Does the Lord of the Heavens have grounds to recommend otherwise?”

Not the warm and familiar ‘paidhi-ji,’ translator for human affairs, but his other office, his capacity as atevi lord, and in that address, he found his window of opportunity. “One has a host of recommendations, aiji-ma.” He got up, remote from the aiji as he was, bowed, received the little move of the hand that meant he could approach, and he did so—bowed in front of the chair, then, undiscouraged, dropped to his knee at Tabini’s very chairside for a quick, private piece of communication, with only Damiri adjacent.

“We met other foreigners out there, aiji-ma, foreigners to humans, too, and, all credit to the dowager and to your son, aiji-ma, these new foreigners are expecting— our whole agreement with them rests on it—to find you in power and able to answer them. We have assured them you sent our mission out to them, to unwind all the mistaken communications between them and humans. We have assured them you are in charge, and will take charge, a situation for which they have reasonably high hopes.”

“We have heard something of the sort.” It could only have come from the dowager. “You have been quite busy in remote space, paidhi-aiji.”

“But there is a grave complication, aiji-ma. These foreigners themselves claim powerful and dangerous enemies, still another batch of foreigners, aggressive and with a bad history, on the far side of their territory. In short, aiji-ma, these foreigners are involved in a situation we do not understand, nothing that threatens us yet, but there are details—everything—in my computer, aiji-ma, including linguistic records and transcripts of negotiations in which the dowager and your son were deeply involved. They will tell you events, but I have a long, long account to give, information which the legislature and the Guild must understand, information absolutely critical to our safety. If one could engage the media, we have a reason it is absolutely essential for you to be safe—”

“We have already heard something of the details,” Tabini said, “which are neither here nor there at the moment. There are more urgent things.”

“We might publish the news, aiji-ma, attack the Kadagidi with information, unseat Murini from the capital. If we were to go back to the hills, we could—”

“Back, nandi? Who said where we have been?”

It was information the paidhi had not been told, precisely the sort of information the paidhi-aiji could never afford to let pass his lips anywhere he could be overheard. The tightly-contained ship-world he had lived in had given him very bad habits, and his staff, even Banichi and Jago, could fall into extreme and deadly disfavor if Tabini suspected they had told him classified matters they had learned from his staff.

“Aiji-ma, your whereabouts was my own guess, unfounded, probably entirely inaccurate. One can only apologize, and urge—”

“A guess, indeed.”

“One unfounded on any particular information.”

“A very clever guess, paidhi.”

“Only a surmise, aiji-ma, knowing that this entire unfortunate business has centered around me and foreign influencec”

“Around you!” Tabini outright laughed at the temerity of his notion. “Around you, paidhi-aiji!”

“Indeed,” Ilisidi said, leaning forward on her stick, as she sat on Tabini’s other side. “Around the paidhi, around this galloping modernity which you promoted far and wide, grandson, from shuttles we needed, to television, which we might—gods less fortunate!—have escaped. Kabiu violated. This modern device become the center of attention.You never would listen to advice.”

“Oh, indeed,” Tabini said, and his position had by now become very uncomfortable to hold, kneeling for conversation with one of the powers of the earth and having another primal force suddenly going at her grandson on the other side, in what could well become a lengthy debate. Bren cast about for a graceful way to get up and back to his chair and found none, none at all.

“So you went up into the high hills, did you,” Ilisidi said, “and settled your presence on the innocent Astronomer, who was bound himself sooner or later to be a target? Our esteemed human had no trouble reasoning out this brilliant move. How long before the Kadagidi approach the same conclusion and do harm to the distinguished man and his students?”

“Aijiin-ma.” Peacekeeper being the paidhi’s job, it seemed time to perform it, urgently so, at the risk of extreme disfavor. “It was by no means an apparent guess, if that was where the aiji indeed resided.”

“The hill provinces sheltered us,” Tabini said, “but no longer.

They will be here, mani-ma, presently, in force.”

My God, Bren thought. The hillmen, a hundred little clans at tenuous peace with each other, and for centuries ignoring the rest of the world—what in all reason could move them to come down to the Padi Valley? They’d detested flatland politics. They’d desperately wanted the University that Tabini had finally built up there, and then argued with its modern advice and advisements once they had it.

Not to mention the Observatory, the precious Observatory, adjunct to the University—all the students there. They were set at risk. The University library and all its generations of work, the center for the space program, the shuttle work, the translations of human-given books, the technical translations, many of which were only available by computer reader manualsc Perhaps the look was transparent. “At the University,” Damiri said, looking directly at him, “there was, this year, a general suspension of classes, nand’ paidhi, by order of the pretender. There was a particular attack on the library.”

The bottom dropped out of his stomach.

“The night previous, warned by computer messages, the students dispersed in all directions,” Tabini-aiji said with evident satisfaction, “and took the new books with them. Some have gone back to their homes, some sheltered in the hills, and no few of them have set up on the coast, taking resources with them, spreading word wherever they go, and establishing their own communications network. They have the portable machines. And we are informed they will be here.”

“Do you say,” Uncle Tatiseigi asked querulously from across the room, and, with debate opening up to yet another quarter, it seemed time for the paidhi-aiji to get up and get out of the way. “Do you say not only the hill clans, but next, those ragtag radical students? Those upstarts that deny their clan?”

“Indeed,” Tabini said, and shot out a hand and seized Bren’s arm as Bren attempted to rise from his awkward position and remove himself from the verbal line of fire.

“Aiji-ma.”

“There will be ample time for us to hear your records, paidhi-ji.

But for now the books are all in hiding. The shuttles are under Kadagidi guard, and the pilots have all fled to the outer regions and taken their flight manuals with them. The Kadagidi have the University computers, but their mathematicians are so unwilling to accept the computers’ calculations that, the last we heard, they are paralyzed in debate and argument, refusing to let their own people use the machines. The traditional mathematicians cannot justify what the computers tell them. Their political supporters support the Kadagidi mathematicians, because the computers are, of course, a human idea.” Grim amusement danced in Tabini’s eyes.

“And you know best of all, do you not, paidhi-ji, what that means?”

Intellectual turmoil. The new mathematics. University teachers had so carefully skirted any confrontation of belief against demonstrable mathematical proof, had constructed examples to avoid direct offense, and now that confrontation, blindly pushed forward by the conservatives, had run straight into the University computer department. “Yes, aiji-ma,” he said, envisioning that moment, the traditionalists afraid to destroy the computers, afraid to let information out. The books, the translations would go if the Kadagidi became too frustrated—or too frightened—by their impasse. Everything he had built, everything the University had built, was on the brink not just of hostile rule, but destruction. A return to the precomputer world. A denial of everything the University taught.

“Leave matters to these fools, paidhi-aiji, and let them ban the new books, and deny the evidence and hide what will not fit their numbers, and we will be two hundred years climbing back out of the pit. They say your advice was wrong. Is that not so?”

He was inches from Tabini’s face. Tabini’s grip cut off the blood to his lower arm, the arm an ateva had once broken with his bare hands. It was irrelevant, that old pain. The atevi world swayed, tottered, threatened to crash.

“I might have done things better, aiji-ma. Even if what I said was my best advice.”

“Tell me, paidhi-ji. If one opens a door and discloses a room afire, is the fire one’s fault?”

“If it spread the fire, aiji-ma. If the paidhi has to be at fault, one is ready to be at fault.”

“This fire, this fire, paidhi-aiji, has been eating at the timbers under our feet for a very long time. It would have dropped us all into the flames sooner or later. You knew the hazards. You warned us. And we likewise are not fools. You showed us numbers that the counters could not refute, nor take into their systems, did you not?

Have you fed us poison?”

“No, aiji-ma.” But he had dismissed the danger of disturbed philosophers and outright fortune-tellers as secondary to greater dangers ever since the ship had arrived in the heavens, the ship that had brought them Jase, with all the attendant troubles.

Humans on Mospheira had begun to politic with the ship-folk and some of them had decided to determine the future of the atevi whose planet this wasc which was wrong, by his lights, morally wrong. He had fought that fight, for atevi ownership of their own world. He had gained atevi their place in the heavens.

But he was not, in the long run, atevi. He could not feel what atevi felt. His ‘place in the heavens’ had meant earth-to-orbit flight, and computers, which had meant human mathematics. Human ways of viewing the universe had come flooding into an atevi culture that rested so heavily on its mathematics, its perceptions of balance and harmony, its linguistic accommodations, its courtesies and orders of power and precedence. He had loosed the genie, he had known what he was doing, he had foreseen the dangerc that he might compromise what was atevi, even while trying to save them. Atevi could fix the problem—the mathematics embedded even in the atevi language was able to accommodate a mutable universec of course they could. Was there not the dowager? Was there not the Astronomer, and the mathematicians of the University? Didn’t they adjust their thinking and come back with uniquely atevi insights?

He had thought they could ride the whirlwind, and, being no mathematician, he had left the details to the scholars to hammer out.

And had not the aiji-dowager herself warned him that the whirlwind could not be dismissed? Wrong. Very dangerously wrong.

And Tabini had reinforced those rural fears, by more and more gifts of dazzling technology to even out the economy in the remoter regions, the aiji trying to balance economic advantage, and risking the whole structure. He had had his misgivings all along. He had progressively stifled them, in worse and worse revelations from the heavens. He had never argued with Tabini’s economic policy, his awarding of new construction to depressed regions. It ought to have lifted the whole country up.

He saw, as in a lightning flash, a landscape in convulsion.

And Tabini-aiji, son of a bloody, dangerous man, grandson of a conniving Easterner, had listened to him, attempting to be a different, modern kind of atevi ruler.

“Well, well,” Tabini said, “so we are where we are, paidhi. Our enemies have steadfastly refused to advance their philosophy or their mathematics in the last three hundred years. They may be factually wrong. But, gods less fortunate, they are persistent.”

“Television, an advancement,” Lord Tatiseigi scoffed. “And these computers are questionable and impudent.”

“You would never take the Talidi part, great-uncle.” This bit of politics from Damiri. “They decry computers. One is gratified to know Atageini clan has the sense to own them.”

“A damned nuisance,” Tatiseigi muttered. “They were supposed to report from the valley. And did they?”

“The Kadagidi destroyed the sensor,” Tabini said darkly, “and it reported that, nandi.”

“And what good is it after?” Tatiseigi retorted. “A telephone could have told us how many, and what direction.”

“Your telephones are compromised, nandi.”

“Not Atageini doing! We accepted this Murini under our roof in the interests of peace, when the whole region was in upheaval.

What alternative did we have but further conflict?”

“Did we not say,” Ilisidi interjected, “no mercy for Talidi leadership back when we had the chance? And did I not warn you, Tati-ji, that sheltering their ally was no solution?”

“What were we to do? Slaughter a guest? If you had moved in, he would have moved out sooner.”

“We had our own beast to hunt,” Ilisidi said, leaning on her cane, “and a great deal on our hands, nandi. We have our own province.

And where were you when matters turned difficult, Tati-ji?”

Bren found his hand gone numb.

“Dare you,” Tatiseigi cried, “and under our roof, and us sheltering Ragi guests, to our personal danger, accuse us?”

“Nandiin,” Bren said, “nandiin, one asks, one most earnestly asks—” Tabini was looking him past him when he spoke, but immediately those uncanny pale eyes snapped back to his, at close range. “One most earnestly asks,” he resumed, suddenly short of breath, and felt Tabini’s grip ease, as if Tabini had remembered whose arm he was holding. “Moderation in these events,” Bren finished.

“Moderation,” Tabini said. “Moderation, indeed.” Tabini let him go, and rested the same hand gently on his shoulder. “Baji-naji. The world is in upheaval. So do you have advice to give us, paidhi-aiji?”

His moment. His opportunity. Or the aiji was mocking him. “I have my report to give, aiji-ma.”

“The report,” Tabini said, as if such things were very far from his mind at the moment. “There will be many reports, paidhi-aiji, piles of reports. We have already heard where you have been, and what you have done, and promised in our name.”

“You say you hear,” Ilisidi muttered.

“We have never failed to hear your opinions, grandmother.”

“Heard us, and disregarded us,” Ilisidi said. No one daunted her in argument. “After which you hurled us off to space and went your own way!”

“We put you in charge of educating our heir, establishing atevi authority in the heavens—and making agreements in our name and in the name of the aishidi’tat. This was not an inconsiderable job for an Easterner and an outlander, grandmother! Wherein was this any disrespect of your views?”

“Well, well, outlander is it, blood of mine? And we have accomplished both tasks quite well, have we not? Now need we straighten out this current mess for you? Dare these fools in the south say it was the paidhi’s choice? It was yours! It was nothing but yours!”

It was decidedly time to move aside. But the aiji still rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Mani-ma,” Tabini said. “In all due respect—”

“Oh, pish! Are we fools? This movement has been brewing and bubbling for far more than the mere decade of the paidhi’s close involvement. Toss a treasure into a crowd and all dignity and common sense vanish in the scramble, and everyone emerges bloody. Toss human treasure into the same situation and watch sensible folk start scrambling for this and that piece of value, for factories to spoil their skies and new goods to corrupt their common sense! You loosed the prospect of wealth, new importance for whole provinces, new fortunes, entire new houses elevated or created by this rush to space, with all the upheaval in rights of precedence and legislative power— Gods less fortunate, grandson, what did you expect in this condition but a riot?”

“And confusion,” Tabini said. “Never forget confusion and folly, which always attend change, do they not? Change what exists, and toss what-will-be into the air, and, yes, certain fools lose all certainty about the rules.”

“Have we not said so?” Tatiseigi said from across the room.

“Human influence comes in, human goods, human wealth, and now we have a confusion in man’chi and a galloping calamity of unrest in the rural provinces. Did we not warn at the outset this would be the result, aiji-ma? We warned you not to promote this human!”

“In the calamities you name,” Tabini said sharply, “is the fault in the paidhi-aiji, that greed and ambition break out among us? Power is the question. Power has always been the issue, and whether there will be an aishidi’tat in future, or whether this moment will give a toehold to the lurkers-in-wait who want power and who will carve the aishidi’tat into regions and interests, even if all they gain is the chance to battle each other for scraps of interest to themselves. Ambition of that sort has existed from the foundation of the world. Outright folly and selfish greed! And blame the paidhi-aiji that folly found an opportunity? Never lay that failing at the paidhi’s feet. Was it my folly not to have broken the houses of the conspirators? The paidhi may have counseled moderation but the power to act was constantly in my hands.”

“Oh, let us not forget the Kadagidi,” Ilisidi said. “Let us not overlook their flaws. Think of that, Tati-ji. You relied on their promises. You listened. The Atageini took them for house-guests and even married into the clan.”

“I listened to them?” Tatiseigi cried. “Three hundred years sitting on our boundary, the upstarts, and sending their feuds across our border, politicking with the Ragi, with the Kaoni, with the Edi, and with us—yes, we have connections with the Kadagidi. One cannot live as neighbors for three hundred years without some connections, however unfortunate, and indeed we took our turn believing in the aishidi’tat, in ignoring the numbers, in attempting to mend old feuds and patch up old differences with our neighbors, precisely the Kadagidi, as we were advised to do, as we were even threatened with high displeasure if we failed to do! Yes, thanks to the aishidi’tat we have cross-connections, lately forged, against our better judgment and by the blandishments of young fools hot to marry—but the aishidi’tat was created precisely to knit associations together and overcome these old feuds, was it not? It was to give us all advantage! And where is the usefulness of the aishidi’tat now in protecting us, when we fritter away our resources, fling our wealth off into the ether, and create this house in the heavens where we mix what experience has shown us should never be mixed, not just Atageini with Kadagidi, gods more fortunate! But humans with atevi, which has always brought war!

Have we forgotten that?”

The grip had closed on Bren’s shoulder. He was sure he would have bruises, so tight had it become. And never mind the chief offender in politicking with the Kadagidi through the most recent years had been Tatiseigi himselfc attempting to straighten out these tangled old and new connections, that might be the truth, but at the same time forming a close association entirely troublesome, even threatening to the aishidi’tat. The whole Padi Valley sat as the geographical heart of the country, and, partly due to Tatiseigi, it was always in a flutter.

And never doubt this old curmudgeon would have made a move to take the aijinate for himself years ago if he remotely had the backing. That a descendant of his was Tabini’s heir was the only reason they were safe under this roof.

Tabini said not a thing to that argument.

But Damiri, Atageini herself, had no such reserve. “And have Atageini never contributed materially to the Kadagidi’s indiscretions? Have you not looked for your own advantage in their upheavals, encouraged their conniving with the south? Where were you when a simple refusal to shelter their dissident members would have put them within reach of the Guild and saved us all this trouble?”

“Oh, now, indeed, niece!” Tatiseigi said.

“Indeed?” Ilisidi said ominously. “Indeed you have done so repeatedly, nor can deny it, Tati-ji. And did I not tell you where this double-dealing would lead? We told you to dispose of Murini. Now we have arrived at the destination of this policy of yours. We are clearly there, at this moment.”

“Bren-ji,” Tabini said quietly, easing his grip and massaging the shoulder he had abused, “at this threshold of a memorable family fight, do us a great favor and go outside. Be sure our son stays safe.

Go. And we shall see you this evening, if these households survive.”

“Aiji-ma.” He got up, still feeling the impression of fingers and a tingling in his arm. He bowed, and bowed generally, then specifically and very politely bowed to their host. “With your permission, nandi,” he said to Tatiseigi, and immediately headed for the door.

In one part, oh, he wanted to know exactly what Tabini meant to say regarding the family business between the Ragi clan and the Atageini that had been simmering all his career. But in another, more sensible part he was absolutely sure that it would by no means improve a human’s welcome with Uncle Tatiseigi if he stayed to witness the family laundry laid out in order.

All was still decorously quiet as he shut the door, nodded a quiet courtesy to Tabini’s chief of security, then picked up Jago.

“We are to find the heir,” he said quietly, “on the aiji’s request.

One assumes Banichi and Cenedi are already on the track.” It was still all too quiet behind that door, but then, atevi fights were sometimes exceedingly quiet, phrased in extravagant politeness, interspersed by long silences, and occasionally with whole pots of tea, simply because the recourse to misstatement could be deadly.

In very fact, the aiji under anyone’s roof was the one who gave the orders, with quiet, polite acknowledgment of his host, it was true; but Tabini would give the orders.

And the warlike half of those gathered on the lawn and up and down the drive, the really experienced fighters, as opposed to the farmers and shopkeepers, were all the aiji’s forces. Lord Tatiseigi had no means to object to the aiji’s presence or his decisions, and no profit in doing so. Tatiseigi had always skirted the edges of conflicts, never directly stood for or against anything, and now, in the heir, he had a route to power, if only he stayed quiet, and if only the aiji won the day. So he was quite, quite confident Tabini would have his way, whatever that way was.

It was, however, very likely that the paidhi was going to be a central subject of debate inside that room. Words might be passed that Tabini had no wish for him to hear.

At very worst— “The young gentleman has his young escort with him, nandi,”

Jago said as they moved. “He ran down to the steps and out the door.”

“To find the house fuel tank,” he murmured as they negotiated the steps off the main floor and into the foyer, under the scaffolding.

“The fuel tank?” Jago asked.

That did sound entirely ominous, in mental review. It might become even more ominous, if youthful security grew distracted in a press of the curious and enthusiastic around the young stranger.

There was a remote possibility of Kadagidi infiltrators on the estate, more apt to conceal their movements within a crowd. In that thought he hastened his steps, under the scaffolding around the damaged frieze of the entryway, across a scatter of carpentry shavings at the door, and emerged into the afternoon sun, on steps high above what had been a stately hedge, elegant lawn, and cobbled drive.

The jam on the cobbled drive now stretched out of sight among the hedges and over the hill. Mecheiti grazed the lawn, among tents, and the hedges were in tatters. The nearest vehicles had become gathering points for a motley collection of townsmen armed with hunting rifles, some ladies and gentlemen, doubtless town officials, wearing brocade coats by no means suited to rough living.

The latter were local ladies and gentleman who had not, thus far, found lodging in the lordly house, to which they would ordinarily be entitled. They might be late arrivals out of Heitisi, the neighboring aggregate of towns in this area of the Padi Valley. But as he passed the corner of the house, he saw they were not at all the whole of the crowd. There was a sizeable gathering as well beyond the eastern hedge, near the charcoaled uprights that had been the stable.

“The fuel tank,” Jago said, “is there.”

The boy was not immediately visible, but he caught sight of Banichi and Cenedi. Dignity be damned, Bren thought, and began to run.

3

The fuel pump, thank God, did not sit close enough to the stables to have been involved in the conflagration. The station was an inconspicuous little concrete pad, bearing tire marks, with a small pump at the side, the sort of thing one might have tripped over in the dark. But it must be working. A small group had already left the area, bearing fuel cans down the hill toward the plane in the meadow, and entraining a straggle of spectators from up on the hill.

The straggle included the young gentleman and his companion, to be sure, in plain view, at the head of the advance, and available to any sniper, right behind Rejiri and the strong men bearing gas cans, Banichi and Cenedi in close attendance.

Bren took out down the hill in the wake of the crowd, Jago beside him, both walking faster and faster, until they reached Banichi and Cenedi—who, absent a clear threat, had not been able to stop the young rascals. It took a lord who outranked him, and he could, a little out of breath, and with his security, just overtake Cajeiri as they reached the bottom of the hill.

“Nandi.” A little nod as they arrived at their destination “I am obeying my father.”

“One is absolutely certain the young gentleman is exercising prudence.” One could make clever, light remarks. One could attempt to make his presence out here other than what it was, a retrieval mission. Neither would fool Cajeiri, who had just marched ahead of his great-grandmother’s security. “But this is not the closed environment of the ship. There might be rifles, the other side of the meadow. We have no idea who may be in the neighborhood. I do not personally know all these people. A Kadagidi agent could be walking right beside us, in all this crowd. Banichi will not be pleased with this. Nor will Cenedi.”

“A professional would not risk his life to assassinate us, would he?”

Oh, the arrogance of having overheard too much. And not nearly enough.

“There are circumstances, young sir,” Banichi said quietly, in his deep voice. “Once you have lived long enough, you may hear of them. This is not wise.”

A little upward glance. The lad had had Banichi for a teacher, in the corridors of the ship. If Cajeiri had a personal deity, it was likely Banichi, who had taught him to build remote controls, and once converted Cajeiri’s best toy car to a weapon. And that particular tone in Banichi’s voice, coupled with arriving authority, finally brought a little worry to that young face.

The can-bearers and Rejiri had reached the plane, meanwhile, and Rejiri began to unfasten the fuel cap.

“Stop here, young sir,” Bren said, as Cajeiri kept walking.

The boy hesitated half a step. “I want to watch. I have walked all this way perfectly safely. Assassins would have shot us by now, would they not? And the airplane would be cover if there were trouble.”

“Indeed,” Bren said, “with all that fuel about. And all this crowd around us will take their limit from you, young lord. The obligation of a person of consequence is to set limits and not bring all this crowd to the side of the plane to hamper the pilot.”

A half glance toward the goal. And not quite a glance—one could all but hear Ilisidi’s reminder to observe stiff-backed dignity.

Prudence might not have figured anywhere in Cajeiri’s intentions, and he had defied two missions sent to stop him, but he had come to a stop now, and the onlookers, adult and many of them also persons of consequence, had accordingly stopped, providing a modicum of cover and a certain weight of inertia in the crowd. Cajeiri took in a deep breath, drew himself up perhaps a hand taller—or he was standing on a small hummock—and scowled at this development, this check on his freedom.

The vantage he had, however, preserved a view of the fueling, and of where the fuel went in. They subsequently had a good view of Rejiri prepping his machine. Then Rejiri got in, started the engine, and with a very satisfactory roar, maneuvered the plane on the meadow.

“Aircraft must face the wind during takeoff,” Bren explained during this move, “and it needs a long run to get into the air, another excellent reason to keep the crowd out of the way. That propeller could dice a person into small bits.”

Cajeiri looked at him, and then at the plane, suitably impressed.

“Note the moveable panels on the wings, young sir,” Jago said.

“Those will shape the wing for maximum lift on the wind. Lift will carry it off the ground and keep it aloft.”

“One thought the propeller carried it off the ground, nadi.”

“Speed from the propeller and lift from the wings and body are the means, young sir. A small, light plane can actually have its engine fail in the sky and still land safelyc given a smooth landing area, and the lift it still enjoys from wings and body. As it descends through the air, it gathers speed and lift much as if the engine were running. Like Toby’s boat, which will not steer at all until it moves fast enough, do you recall? The plane has a rudder, on its tail, which also directs it. See?”

The plane was gathering speed now.

“Oh!” Cajeiri exclaimed, and then did not bounce in place. He folded his hands behind him, fingers tightly locked, the perfect young gentleman. And he added, glumly, “One wished to see inside,” as the crowd at large applauded the takeoff. The locals clearly found an aircraft at close hand quite as much a novelty as Cajeiri did. The plane soared, roared deafeningly over the crowd, and banked steeply toward the west, as cries went up from the hill.

“Is it all right?” Cajeiri asked in sudden alarm.

“A turn,” Bren said, and true enough, Rejiri leveled off and gathered altitude, headed toward the railway, the noise of the plane fading, as the rear of the crowd began to turn back toward the hill.

“Now we should go,” Bren said. “Back to safety, young sir. Back to the house.”

They walked. Cajeiri and his young guard walked with them. “I want to fly a plane,” Cajeiri said.

Was one in the least surprised?

“I want to fly the shuttle,” Cajeiri added.

One could still be surprised.

“You should talk to the shuttle pilots regarding that matter, young sir,” Jago said, a definite rescue from the topic, perhaps a new and dangerous ambition, granted they lived through this day.

They walked up the hill, passing many slower walkers in the crowd, then a handful of other persons filling fuel cans at the pumpc whether or not authorized was itself a question, but the fuel pump had been unlocked, its existence made known, and others took advantage.

Some other arrival was in progress in the meanwhile, a large bus that, ignoring the jam on the driveway, which might stretch for a kilometer and more, had gotten around the long hedge. Now it came rolling across the open lawn between the jammed drive and the Taibeni camp, bouncing and bumping in its haste. Perhaps its driver had been alarmed by the aircraft passing over their heads, and had made an emergency move to try to gain the house, but its course across the lawn had come very close to the Taibeni camp.

Mecheiti bellowed protests to the heavens and vexed Taibeni came out to the edge of their camp, bearing weapons.

“Get to the house, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, and only then did the full range of possibilities occur to him. Rifles were out. Guns were drawn, all facing that bus across the hedge.

This is insane, Bren thought, hurrying Cajeiri and his escort up the house steps. Surely no Kadagidi invader would dare.

But he climbed, and cast a look back only when he had reached the top of the steps. The errant bus had stopped, just on the other side of the hedge.

It had stopped, under a hundred guns, and a lordly passenger was debarking in considerable indignation.

“Uncle will not be pleased with them for parking on the lawn,”

Cajeiri said, “whoever did that.”

To say the least, uncle would not be pleased.

But more than the untoward incursion of the bus, he had the sudden image of all those vehicles on the driveway, constrained by the hedges on either side, attempting to move under hostile fire. Or trying to evade some vehicle carrying explosives across that same lawn.

Folly, his own sense said. He was sure Banichi and Jago saw the same.

But this bus at least had brought only another set of passengers, servants, bodyguards, and baggage.

“Come inside,” Bren said, laying a hand on the young gentleman’s shoulder. “Here is far too exposed. We are sure they are safe, but this is long enough for—”

“Those are Ajuri colors!” Cajeiri said suddenly, and neither pointed, that dreadful human gesture, nor raised his voice too high as he indicated the bus, the self-important arrival that had come in on the lawn. “That will be my great-grandfather and my uncle on my mother’s side that just ran over uncle’s grass.”

Ajuri clan. Well, Damiri had indicated they would be here by evening. And the sun had entered the last third of the sky. Ajuri had pushed it, and come a little early, perhaps in fear of traveling close to dark.

“Then I suppose we shall wait for them,” Bren said, from their vantage on the steps. They did seem safe. The plane and its noise had vanished, the outraged Taibeni had quieted the mecheiti, rifles and guns were put away, and the bus had by now disgorged a collection of staff and, behind the first lord, an elderly man who was very likely the aiji of Ajuri clan, Damiri’s grandfather. The first to alight, the younger gentleman of note, might well be Damiri’s uncle, second highest lord. There were a couple of other aristocrats, and a collection of still younger individuals, including young ladies.

The middle tier of aristocrats were all carrying hunting rifles, some of them flashing gold baroque ornament on the stocks, and with ammunition cases in evidence, quite the martial addition; but more to be feared, black-uniformed Guild security moved around them, watchful and bearing automatic weapons, and not at all favoring the armed Taibeni in their lords’ vicinity. In the background, a few harried domestic staff began to hand suitcases out of stowage, a pile which grew and grew. The Ajuri, a burgeoning small platoon of them, had every intent, it was clear, of claiming lodgings in the housec suitcases and staff and all.

Indeed, it might be a reasonable expectation, under ordinary circumstances. They had certain rights of approach, being Damiri’s relations, with Tabini in residence.

But Tatiseigi, the boy was right, would have different thoughts.

They were already limited in space. Tirnamardi’s upstairs had suffered in the attack. The staff and the boilers were already taxed to the limit.

Perhaps they should at least wait and try to slow the advance, and put the overhasty Ajuri in a calmer frame of mind. Their position on the steps was sheltered by the house, by the presence of Banichi and Jago, and the new arrivals pushed their way through the shattered hedge with some dispatch, weaving through the barrier of parked trucks, baggage and staff following, in evident intent to reach the house quickly. The elderly gentleman had taken command and walked ahead of the rest, in no mood to wait.

Damiri’s grandfather. Bren searched his memory for the name.

Damiri’s uncle, a handsome fellow, was named Kadiyi, Bren recalled, out of the depths of his memory: He walked second. The old lord, the one who looked to have swallowed vinegar, was Benati, Bejadi, or some such.

Cajeiri descended to the midsteps landing, a little to the fore, and bowed properly as the old lord came up the steps, but the old man paid his young kinsman not a scrap of notice— climbed, in fact, right past him. The second lord did the same, to Cajeiri’s indignation, and up the steps they came, head-on toward Bren.

“You!” the old man said. In Ragi, that address was inestimably rude. “Foreigner! Out of our way, damn your impudence!”

“Honored sir,” Bren said. Clearly he had made a mistake in delaying to welcome the arrivals—there was no way in all the world the old man mistook him for anyone else on the planet, and clearly the old man meant exactly what he said. And finding it prudent and politic to let the insult slide off for the moment, and let Tabini-aiji and Tatiseigi deal with this brusque advance, Bren gave a slight bow and moved aside, cueing Banichi and Jago to let the affront pass, outraged as they might be.

Not so Cajeiri, who now boiled up the steps with Jegari in close attendance, right on the old lord’s heels. Cajeiri brushed past the second lord, past the old man, right to the top of the steps and the landing, to plant himself and his young Taibeni bodyguard between Ajuri clan and Tatiseigi’s front door.

“Outrageous! Outrageous action, sirs!” Did one hear the aiji-dowager’s tones ringing in that young voice? Bren was appalled, and hastened upward to try to patch up matters, hopeless as it seemed.

The lords of the Ajuri had stopped in anger and startlement, and perhaps, in that half-heartbeat, both of them had figured out that the child on the steps, Taibeni guard and all, was not a local Atageini—a surmise a young boy’s presence near the paidhi-aiji might instantly have suggested to the quick-witted. But Cajeiri was not through.

“Shall the paidhi-aiji have an apology, nandiin?” Direct quote from his great-grandmother, a question directed at the young gentleman, not once, but several times, at key intervals in their voyage. Bren stood stock still, but gathered the presence to bow profoundly as the Ajuri swung a collectively outraged look in his direction. “He had better have it!” Cajeiri said. “Now!”

“Nandiin,” Bren said in a low voice, and with a deep bow.

“Is this Damiri’s son?” the old man snapped. “Is this rude young person my great-grandson?”

“I am my father’s son, and the aiji-dowager’s great-grandson,”

Cajeiri said, head high, eye to eye with his uncle and great-grandfather, whom he omitted from the genealogy. “And my mother is inside, and my father, and my great-uncle, and my great-grandmother the aiji-dowager. All of them esteem the paidhi very highly.”

“Well, we see all around us the result of that policy,” the old lord said, and shoved past, brushing past the boy and his guard, this time with no excuse of ignorance.

“Jegari!” Cajeiri snapped, and, Oh, my God, Bren thought, and moved to prevent a weapon being drawn, but not faster than Banichi and Jago, not faster than the Ajuri bodyguard— while young Jegari, do him credit, had only put his body between Cajeiri and the indignity of being shoved aside by his own great-grandfather.

Atageini Guildsmen, cooler heads and uninvolved, had by that time frozen, standing stock still in confrontation, blocking their doorway to access as the Ajuri lords reached the upper landing. The intrusion ran right into the roadblock.

“You will not lay hands on my lord, sir,” Jegari pursued the Ajuri from behind, in a voice very quiet, and full of dignity, despite the fact it was a young, high voice, and he was not Guild, nor remotely a match for those tall, black-clad individuals in the old man’s company who were.

“Truce,” Banichi said, shoving between, confronting the five Ajuri Guildsmen face to face, and a head taller than four of them. “Truce.

Let all pass. This is best settled inside.”

“Open the doors!” the Ajuri lord demanded, which did nothing to convince the Atageini guards, who continued to stand in his path.

Diplomacy seemed the civilized recourse, and being the only diplomat on scene, Bren moved very quietly up a step or two, bowed, said, “May one suggest,” as the Ajuri lords simultaneously turned a burning look his way. “This is a sorry misunderstanding, ”

Bren said, ever so quietly, and, not giving way in the least, “and one regrets having been a provocation to it. You have grown considerably, young sir, and you have borrowed your clothes from staff, so clearly your own kin failed to know you. Your great-grandfather has had a very tiring, very dangerous trip.” A deep, collected bow to the old lord, with absolutely no hint of his own outrage and the host of other feelings he had no business to let well up into his job—tiring trip, hell! He’d lay his own and Cajeiri’s against it, hour for hour, and throw in the last two years as well.“Some very reasonable people consider the paidhi-aiji at fault for his advice to your father. That is solely for your father to judge.

But your estimable great-grandfather and your uncle have surely come here at great trouble to support your mother, nonetheless, young sir, and in supporting her, they have come to support you, as well. Do consider that, and let them pass.”

The old man had gone quite impassive, somewhat recovering his breath and his dignity, and one would have to have known both gentlemen, the older and the younger, to know what emotions were actually going on behind those faces. There was a lengthy pause, all the Ajuri staff and luggage-bearing servants gone almost as expressionless. A far-traveling human could quite lose that knack of impassivity, in close shipboard society—but it was vital he recover that skill in himself, and he had to encourage the boy, whose face was still like a thundercloudc the boy who, one had to reckon, in two years of shipboard life, only his great-grandmother had ever sharply reined in.

“True,” the old lord said darkly, as if it were a bad taste in his mouth to agree with the paidhi in anything at all. “Altogether true.” The younger, the boy’s great-uncle, still glowered.

“Great-grandfather.” A little scowling bow, but thank God the dowager’s training had sunk in more than skin deep. She had seen to it the boy had the social reflexes to take an adult hint and make that gesture, without which, at this moment, things could only have gotten worse.

“Grand-nephew.” A bow, finally, from the second lord.

“Great-uncle.” A second proper bow, finally a blink in that confrontational stare. “But we say again, you must respect the paidhi-aiji, great-uncle.”

“Nand’ paidhi.” It was not a happy face the second Ajuri lord turned in his direction: The expression was still completely impassive, and Bren returned the infinitesimally slight bow with measured depth, his own expression under rigid control now, not ceding anything but an agreement to civilized restraint on both sides.

The Guild, meanwhile, on all sides involved, had at no moment relaxed, and did not ease their stance in the least until Cajeiri directed his great-grandfather to the doors and the Atageini guards deemed the situation settled enough to let the lot of them into their lord’s house.

In they went, past workmen noisily sawing away at a piece of timber and shedding sawdust onto their heads. That stopped. There was embarrassed silence in the scaffolded heights, and the Ajuri marched on through, with Cajeiri behind them.

Bren followed, Banichi and Jago on either side of him, still alert, past the damaged lily frieze, the rest of the group having ascended the slight rise onto the main floor, where hammering likewise gave way to silence.

The boy had called on his bodyguard to deal with his uncle. That single sharp word still had Bren’s nerves rattled. “Perhaps one should advise Ismini and Cenedi,” he said to Banichi and Jago under his breath as they hastened up the steps, and Jago immediately took the steps two at a time, skirting around the group in an effort to reach the aiji’s and the aiji-dowager’s bodyguards—before the collective situation reached the drawing room.

Bren climbed the steps behind the cascading calamity.

“Well managed, nandi,” Banichi muttered, treading beside him.

“One can only regret to have placed my staff in an awkward position,” he murmured, echoes of footfalls hiding their voices.

“Your staff has absolutely no regret in that regard,” Banichi said.

Banichi’s and Jago’s steadfastness was the only warmth in a world gone suddenly much colder. And it posed a weight of responsibility. He wondered if he had the personal fortitude to approach the drawing room door at the moment, following the Ajuri entry into that conference. Or if it was wise at all to do so, risking more confrontation.

But Jago was beside that door, waiting for him among the bodyguards posted outside—now numbering Ajuri among them, the lords having gone inside—and Jago caught his eye with a look that said she had delivered her message and was going to keep her station out here.

More to the point, Ilisidi’s chief of security, Cenedi, and Ismini, head of the aiji’s guard, had just disappeared into that room, to have a quiet word with their lady and lord doubtless, and to advise them of the confrontation outside. Cajeiri went in on their heels.

And if the dustup between the great-grandfather and Cajeiri continued in there, and involved Ilisidi—well, that would frost the cake, as his mother used to say, and threaten agreements that had been made with dynastic purpose. The whole trembling association was at risk of fracture, the consort’s relatives on one side and Tabini and the heir and the aiji-dowager on the other.

Not to mention Uncle Tatiseigi, whose lawn was being parked upon, now, by a heavy bus of a clan nominally his ally by marriage, but clearly a clan with notions of special privilege, notions derived from Damiri’s parentage and their rival connections to the aijinate.

He had no choice, he decided. He left Banichi and Jago, passed the doors. The Ajuri lord, Benedi—that was the name, thank God he finally recalled it—who at the moment was being received by his granddaughter Damiri—cast a look over his shoulder and let a scowl escape his impassive mask. Damiri’s face still preserved a grimly-held smile, for him and for her father’s surviving brother.

Bren, for his part, avoided all eyes and gave a private nod of gratitude to the Atageini servant who quietly slid a chair into position near him, at the very bottom of the social order. He sat down there in silence, sat through the slight exchange of formal courtesies between the Ajuri, Tabini, and Ilisidi, and finally listened through the Ajuri’s extravagant praise of Tatiseigi, who perhaps had not looked outside since dawn. The family was making some effort to keep the peace, at least.

But the conversation immediately took a sharper edge as Ilisidi, hard upon Tatiseigi’s pleasant greeting, quoted a very obscure machimi writer about, “late to the contest, ah, late and bringing flowers to his kin.” Bren studied his hands, racking his brain in vain to remember the rest of the line, which came from some rarely-performed machimi they had had on tape on the voyage. An Eastern playwright, from Ilisidi’s end of the civilized world. He was sure the next line was something less than complimentary, something about sailing this way and that and arriving to his lord’s aid long after his lord’s enemies had slaughtered the household.

One only hoped the Ajuri were not conversant with obscure Malguri poets.

And, God, need they have Ilisidi start a war, as if they lacked all other impetus? Ilisidi had Cenedi at the back of her chair, Guild threat lurking in very senior form, and Ilisidi’s expression was sweet, familial malevolence, as if she truly hoped the Ajuri lord did understand her. Cenedi had been leaning near Ilisidi a moment ago, and he was now convinced Ilisidi had gotten the story of events on the step outside, particularly including the brusque treatment of her cherished great-grandson. Cajeiri meanwhile had settled, politically savvy for his years, right between his parents, and sat there like a young basilisk, regarding his maternal relatives with still smoldering ire and looking very satisfied with his great-grandmother. Cajeiri knew the quote, damned right he did, part of two years under Ilisidi’s tutelage.

Bren kept from meeting any eye, not encouraging the dowager to find another, plainer quote from her considerable repertoire. And Tatiseigi immediately rose to the social challenge, quoting from a better known and safer author, something about “their tents arrayed across the plain,” and “drinking rivers dry,” with a mournful reference to his ravaged house grounds, one was sure, and then to the enemy “lurking in the east.” “to come down with the gathering night.” That at least added up to a welcome, Bren was sure, parsing through the references, although the part about the enemy in the east raised a little uneasiness among the Ajuri.

“You expect yet another assault, nand’ Tatiseigi?”

“We have taken precautions,” Tabini said in his deep, attention-getting voice. “We have set out alarms and given orders to the foremost of this unlikely assemblage of buses—the vehicles are refueling.”

“Refueling,” the Ajuri lord echoed him uneasily, settling on a fragile chair, his son next to him. He accepted a cup of tea, and a plate of cakes appeared on the table between the two Ajuri, like the smaller stack that arrived, with a portable table, at Bren’s elbow.

Bren found no appetite for the teacakes, and they went untouched, but the Ajuri lords washed down several apiece. The Ajuri were some distance from home, and if they had come all the way by bus, avoiding the trains, they had certainly been traveling since dawn.

They might expect this snack as a prelude to supperc to which they expected to be invited, one was sure. “To what purpose, may we ask, aiji-ma?”

At last, that aiji-ma, that personal acknowledgment of the head of association. No one twitched. But if human nerves reverberated to it, Bren was sure atevi ones did. Ajuri had not wriggled sideways, not for a moment, and committed.

Good, he said to himself, and in Tabini’s answer, that they had to be ready for anything, talk came down to specifics: The current state of the roads, Murini’s likely response to the increasing gathering of support here, the placement of patrols on the estate and out across the border between Atageini clan and the Kadagidi, and all manner of things the paidhi could be very certain were also the topic of conversation outside the door among the various guards, who would have far better specifics on Tabini’s intentions.

But what a listener could gather just inside this room drew a vivid enough picture: That Tabini was determined to make a stand here, to have the buses for heavy assault vehicles if need be, or mobile fortification to prevent an incursion into the grounds.

It might be the most convenient place to rally supporters— but this house, with wide-open rolling meadows and fields around it, was hardly a protected position. And with Tabini-aiji’s supporters swarming over this and the adjacent province to reach Tirnamardi, they were concentrating themselves into an increasingly attractive target in the process.

A human would do things atevi wouldn’t, he reminded himself.

But, God, it felt chancy, relying oh so much on atevi notions of kabiu and acceptable behavior, in apparent confidence that Murini absolutely would not use aircraft and bomb this buildingc simply because it was not kabiu.

For a listening human, straight from space, and having the concept of defense in three dimensions fresh in mind, this gathering added up to a very queasy situation, one in which he kept reminding himself, no, no, no, human nerves did not resonate at all reliably. No, atevi truly would not expect certain things to happen, for a complex of reasons, some of which were simply because, instinctually, atevi would not, could not, sanely speaking, go against the bounds of kabiu and would not breach the bonds of aishi , that indefinable instinct of group, of obligation, ofc There was just no human word for it, beyond a comparison to mother-love and so-named human decency. A sane ateva just didn’t do certain things, didn’t attack the head of his own association, for starters, while aishi held. He didn’t attack the remoter associations of his association for the same reason— and it was beyond didn’t: It was all the way over to being in his right mind, couldn’t think of it.

Unlessc Unless the ateva in question was that odd psychological construct, an individual to whom man’chi flowed, who didn’t particularly think he owed man’chi upward to anyone else. That psychological construct added up, in atevi terms, to being born an aiji. A born leader. Or at least an ateva who by birth or experience was immune to constraints that applied to others. In human terms, a psychopathic personality.

Among atevi such a person, at the top of the pyramid of responsibilities, made society work. He actually prevented wars by his very existence, in the best application of man’chi. He stopped wars cold, by preemptive action, and his assurance of having followers enough to carry out his objectives.

Tabini was certainly one such personality, trained from infancy to expect man’chi to flow upward from others, taught to drink it down like wine, in judicious sips, not wholesale gluttony. So, one day, everyone expected Cajeiri to be that sort of leader.

But dared one remember such a personality was also capable of going way out on an ethical cliff-edge? A strong enough aiji was capable of taking himself and his followers over that aforementioned edge of behavior the followers would by no means risk on their own, and the only possible brake on the situation was when enough followers simultaneously came to their senses and decided the person they’d followed was not a good leader. That was ideally how the system worked. A bad leader lost followers, someone turned on him, someone stuck a knife in his ribs, and another leader rose up from among the group. Atevi instincts somehow triggered that change of opinion at the right moment.

Logically, things began to balance again, and sane people en masse adjusted the situation until the group found itself a new leader.

But in the meantime people died. Sometimes a lot of people. And sometimes things ordinarily unthinkable did happen.

It was no comfort at all to be human and thinking quite readily of the physical possibilities of a massed target out in that driveway, an attraction for bombs, planes, poison gas grenades, or anything else a murderous and over-vaunting intention could come up with.

But one thing he knew: Setting forward the possibility of someone doing such things, in this conservative company, could only convince Tatiseigi and these suspicious Ajuri aristocrats that humans were depraved beyond belief and just naturally bent toward bad behavior. He was not the individual who could lead them over such a brink.

Give Tabini the benefit of his advice—hell, yes. Tabini had frequently asked him such dark questions, in privatec and might now, if they ever could achieve ten minutes’ guaranteed privacy in this place.

What would a human do? Tabini had asked him in the old days, before the voyage. What things would you warn against, if it were your own people, paidhi-ji?

It always gave the paidhi-aiji a queasy feeling, answering that question honestly, worrying that he might be giving Tabini ideas—the same way he’d worried when he counseled Tabini to mercy and moderation in the face of treason. Maybe he’d generated ideas he never should have let loose among atevi. Or maybe too much mercy was the key damage he’d done, urging Tabini not to slaughter his defeated enemies. They were sitting here under assault, because certain people had remained alive. They’ll concentrate your opposition, he’d argued; you can keep an eye on them. Leave them alive.

So here he sat under siege by those same enemies, wishing Tabini would ask him for advice one more time, and fearing he would give the wrong advice one more time if Tabini did that.

And meanwhile, roiling about in the basement of his mind, was that other application of kabiu, that word which ordinarily applied to the room arrangement and those flowers in a green vase over on the table: Kabiu, that meant fit or decorous or appropriate, if one was setting a table. Kabiu could also apply to battlefields.

To honor. To proper behavior.

Kabiu, on this occasion, he divined as the reason otherwise sensible people, even the Ajuri, had to set themselves in a target zone, making their statement for this aiji over the other, declaring for civilized behavior, and most of all—maintaining the degree of civilization that underlay atevi culture even in conflict. Man’chi was driving it, an instinct as fatal and as basic an attraction as gravity.

And if, in a great ebbing tide, man’chi left a leader like Murini of the Kadagidi, he was done. He would have no prospect for long life, considering his numerous enemies, and he would find himself instead of well-received under many roofs, suddenly with nowhere in the world to go.

And what answer would Murini the man deliver to this passive attack on his rule? Fatalistic acceptance? Tame surrender?

One didn’t think so. No. He had been a man of subterfuge and connivance, but that didn’t mean he’d go out quietly, nor would those more violent sorts who had supported his claims.

Would the Kadagidi clan, seeing the tide starting to turn against Murini, itself make some redemptive gesture, and fall away from their own lord, who was absent in Shejidan, to keep armed struggle away from their territory?

Murini, as aiji of the whole country, had to leave his own clan and go to Shejidan to rule, expecting the Kadagidi, ironically left leaderless, to stay steadfast in man’chi while the man who should be attending their interests was off claiming the whole continent—was that not the way Tabini-aiji and his predecessors had dealt with Taiben, leaving the clan loyalty behind and hoping for man’chi to survive?

The whole arrangement among the Kadagidi was still new enough that Murini had likely retained control of the Kadagidi in his own hands and not fully allotted clan authority to a strong subordinate. Such adjustments, such as Tabini had with Keimi of the Taibeni, took time, and one could imagine such relationships were sometimes troublesome, and fraught with second thoughts. It took time for reward to repay sacrifice of a clan’s own interests. But it all seemed queasy logic for him to follow, answers wired to buttons that didn’t truly exist in the paidhi’s instincts. He constantly made appeal to analogs and like-this and like-that-but-not, and, in the outcome, found himself utterly at sea, still trying to find the reason all these people were all sitting here waiting for dark and likely attack.

All right. All right. For a moment accept that all these well-dressed people weren’t crazy, accept that the Kadagidi wouldn’t bomb the grounds or attack a dozen clans at once for very practical reasons, like public opinion, or for moral reasons like kabiu, a virtue Bren didn’t for a moment believe Murini possessedc he’d shown damned little sense of it before now.

For a moment assume that the Kadagidi would be sane, middle-tier atevi and that they would make a rational atevi response. What would be a sane and kabiu response from their side of this contest?

Scaled response. Targeted and scaled response rather than a general assault with massive loss of life and subsequent blood-feuds. That was how the Assassins’ Guild was supposed to function, and that was what was anomalous in this whole upheaval.

The silence, the non-involvement of the Assassins’ Guild, the leadership of which was presently sitting in Shejidan deadlocked and refusing to take either aiji’s side, when it should have stepped in immediately to protect Tabini’s household and to prevent the coup in the first place. Now it categorically refused to budge. It had lawyerlike procedures, like a court. It had to hear evidence, receive petitions. An assassination to be obtained involved a Filing of Intent and might see counterfilings on the other side: There were Guild members just like Cenedi, or Banichi and Jago, or a hundred others under this roof and out on the drive—members whose man’chi was to a particular lord, a particular house, above all else. So Guild members would be on both sides of a Filing—but likewise they took a dim view of wildcat operations, movements without Filing and particularly movements that destabilized, rather than stabilized, the government of a region.

Could the Kadagidi, without Filing, move an Assassin into a neutral clan’s territory, and take Tabini out personally? Wipe out the ruling family, down to the youngest? They had tried— at Taiben, when they had hit the lodge and attacked the residency in Shejidan—and the Guild had taken no official action. It had been proven that Tabini had survived the move, and had gathered force, when he had gone out toward the coast, toward Yolanda Mercheson—and the Guild had done nothing to support him.

That had to be troubling Banichi and every other Guild member on the continent. What in hell was going on at Guild Headquarters?

Ordinarily, lords didn’t undertake wildcat operations against one another, precisely because the Guild and the aiji in Shejidan would alike take a dim, lethal view of that behavior. But had it become clear to the Kadagidi that the Guild was not going to act, that there was no argument or Filing that was going to protect Tabini at all?

That would encourage actions far more profitable to the Kadagidi than a frontal assault on a neighbor’s land.

That indicated one action that began to make sense in this situation, one delicate, surgical action that would fragment this gathering and bring down the hopes of restoring the Ragi clan to power. And all the fire and fury might be intended only to mask the process of getting an Assassin into position.

And these various people who had assembled to protect Tabini by their presence and position had incidentally brought an impressive attendance of Guild Assassins as their own bodyguards. The Guild might be neutral, deadlocked, and stuck in Shejidan, but local man’chi was healthy and thriving, and, at the moment, armed to the teeth and sitting on Tatiseigi’s lawn, and probably on the Kadagidi’s front porch, at the same time, if they could get a view of what was happening beyond the hills. Both sides were furnished with Guild enough to spend some time infiltrating and manuevering at this stage— but in the nature of things, Tabini, for his part, had, at every reception, to bet his life that none of these arrivals of other villages, towns, clans, masked some Assassin whose man’chi was secretly to the Kadagidi.

That was surely what the conference outside the door was dealing with, among other things Bren wished he had a clear picture of. They were screening every Guild member who came through the door, and seeking information on every Guild member who might be on the grounds: “Do you know that man, nadi? Did he come with the lord’s wife’s clan?”

He had been in space too long, Bren said to himself. As long as he’d been in atevi society, he had encountered such blind spots in his vision, dark spots, situations where he just didn’t automatically draw the obvious conclusion without asking Banichi or Jago—and even then their plain answer didn’t always evoke all it should. But he had known that very certainly staff was vetting everyone who got past that door: they always did. The Guild in some respects was a sort of exclusive lodge, and the senior members, the really dangerous ones, knew each other by sight, in and out of uniform.

That was why Tabini’s loss of the staff who had protected him so long was such a heavy blow—not alone the emotional loss at their murder, but the practical consequences of new staff not knowing things that had gone to the grave with the previous holders of their offices. The well-oiled machine that had operated so smoothly to protect and inform Tabini was suddenly gone—replaced by new people who had attached themselves to him during his exile, and one only hoped the current chief of Tabini’s personal bodyguard, Ismini, knew his men as well, and that information flowed through that staff with something like the old efficiency. Banichi and Jago had had ties in the aiji’s old household, but they were at least two years out of the loop, and perhaps underinformed and unconnected for much longer than that: they couldn’t reconstitute it.

Ismini—Bren had no idea where he had come from, or who these men were who surrounded Tabini these days.

The whole situation conjured all the machimi he had ever seen, disasters which involved breakdowns of Guild actions, the sort of thing that laid bodies in heaps on the stage, when what should have been a neat, kabiu action, or a sure deflection of an attempted assassination—turned out a real damn mess thanks to new men filling positions they ill understood or outright pursuing divided loyalties, their ties to other agencies imperfectly severed.

The whole train of thought upset his stomach, as if the encounter on the steps wasn’t enough. But the dust around the Ajuri arrival settled in a round of courtesies and sips of tea, never mind the rural Ajuri were themselves a wild card—bringing in a collection of somewhat lower-level Guild that weren’t necessarily as well known to the aiji’s men, or to other staffs. They got in. It would have been a major incident, if Ismini and his men had not let Ajuri in to protect their lord—but bet that they were asking questions out there, and sending runners out to ask among those who might have connections to the Ajuri.

Meanwhile, in the general easing of courtly tensions, at least, Tatiseigi began, inanely enough, to propose a formal supper— trying to put a patch on the fact that, no, the house didn’t have any suitable room for the Ajuri, who were going to have to lodge downstairs in what Tatiseigi extravagantly called the Pearl Room, which one understood would be cleared of records and desks and provided with beds. The Ajuri were not happy. And Tabini meanwhile took the chance to request a special buffet for the staffs, allowing the individual bodyguards the chance to eat on duty and discuss, discussion which would never do at table, oh, no, never, ever discuss business at a proper table, even when the lawn was full of impromptu militiac but most of all, find out what the Ajuri had brought in, and try to resurrect some of the knowledge which had died with Tabini’s original head of staff, investigating, too, the connections the Atageini might know about—since the marriage that had produced Lady Damiri herself, under this roof.

Meanwhile Tatiseigi rattled on, went on to propose the menu, God help them, in meticulous detail, and to recommend a special game delicacy of the region, with a glowing description of the pepper sauce.

Bren laced his hands together across his middle and tried to look appreciative and relaxed instead of grim, desperate, and increasingly anxious about the proceedings—an attack of human nerves, he said to himself, and meanwhile he knew Tatiseigi himself was no doddering fool, and that this performance was purposeful. The dinner in question was going to be one of those formal affairs where meaning ran under every syllable, and where, granted no one was poisoned at the table, atevi felt one another’s intentions out. But he himself wasn’t up to it. He didn’t want to attend a formal supper with the Ajuri. He didn’t want to sit there eating custard and sauce and wondering what was going on in the woodwork, while staffs were just as energetically trying to parse loyalties and connections running back decades if not centuries.

Most of all he wanted, dammit, just five short minutes, in all this expenditure of valuable time, one short chance to talk to Tabini privately for a single interview outside this carefully monitored gathering. He wanted to turn in the report he had risked his life developing, and he thought he deserved that chancec never mind Ilisidi’s staff had doubtless done their briefing, not an unfavorable one, he was sure, and never mind his own report, coming from a human mind when all was said and done, had probably become superfluous in the press of time and threat, at least in Tabini’s estimation. Tabini probably thought it a headache he didn’t need at this point, raising questions he wasn’t ready to deal with—but it wasn’t, dammit, superfluous. He wasn’t sure by any means that Ilisidi would have covered all the essentials the way he would have wanted: He wanted the’t‘s crossed and the i’s dotted with Tabini, he had spent two years picking his words carefully, choosing very precise ways he wanted to set out certain facts of the outside universe to Tabini, and dammit, he was going to have that report riding his mind and weighing down his conscience until he could offload it and say he had done his best.

No matter what then blew up and no matter what blame public opinion laid on his shouldersc which was the other looming threat, that when the dust did settle, he might not be able to get to Tabini at all. He’d had a taste of unbuffered atevi opinion on the steps. He began to ask himself if Tabini’s distance from him didn’t already have something to do with Tabini’s desire to separate himself from human influence, or Tabini’s outright dissatisfaction with him, turning away from the advice he had once relied on. In that estimation, he was lost. He didn’t know what his status was with Tabini, and he couldn’t gain a clear signal one way or the other.

A servant loomed, with a tray. He waved off another offering of cakes, allowing his tea to cool, and wondered meanwhile if anyone had yet taken potshots at Rejiri’s plane or ambushed a trainload of inbound west coast supporters. He tried once, furtively, to catch Ilisidi’s eye: no good. She was not open to inquiry.

And after that he tried to think of an excuse, any excuse, to take his superfluous presence outside, where he might be able to get information.

The dowager was, at the moment, arguing her grandson’s determination not to change his dress for the occasion.

The door opened. Three more individuals arrived, two young ladies and an elderly woman, all of whom suddenly nudged hard at memory: Damiri’s sister Meisi, Bren realized in a little flood of embarrassment. Damiri’s aunt, whose name momentarily defied memory, and a young cousin, now teenaged, nicknamed Deiaja—all Ajuri clan, the female contingent only now arriving from the buses, one supposed, to take their places in the general madness. They seemed quite surprised to see him in the gathering; and the dowager; and next descended on Cajeiri, who scowled at them and refused to be fussed over. Deiaja had outright shot up a foot since he had last seen the child: Small wonder he hadn’t known her when she appeared. And there she was, all cordial bows, with her hair in braids and Ajuri clan ribbon—preparing to be a target right along with all the other fools who had come here. He was completely appalled. Ajuri clan was here, with its younger generation as well as its lord exposed to risk, right along with the Ragi.

Was it a statement, a commitment to a stand, equal risk with the Ragi, the Atageini, and the Taibeni?

But this particular young cousin, this pretty teenager Deiaja, he recalled, was half Kadagidi herself, was that not so?

Ajuri clan had linked to both eastern clans of the Padi Valley, the Atageini and the Kadagidi; and the long-nosed aunt— Geidaro was her name; it came to him in a flash—the aunt was the link in that situation. She had been married to a Kadagidi, a cousin of Murini’s, for at least a decade of her life, the contract now allowed to lapse, since, oh, about the time Cajeiri was bornc And were those events connected—an Ajuri-connected heir born to the Ragi aiji, and Geidaro severs ties with her Kadagidi husband, retaining the daughter in Ajuri possession, however, not to give up the Kadagidi tie, not quite?

Meanwhile Cajeiri rose and bowed to the girl, who had at least six years on him, but not a smidge of height. The courtesy won a pretty smile from Deiaja, even a little simper. Bren rose, guided by habit, despite the urge to flinch from all Ajuri at the moment, and bowed in his turn, quite gravely.

“Nand’ paidhi.” A pretty bow from the Ajuri girl.

“One is honored.” She was a tiny miss, for an atevi, and had Damiri’s willowy look in minature. She smiled as blithely as if they had met at a summer fair, went her way to bow to her aunt’s Atageini great-uncle, and Bren took his seat again, wishing he were not professionally suspicious and asking himself whether this obliging child had had a vote in coming here, or where, precisely, this child’s Kadagidi father was at this exact moment.

Over the eastern border, over in Kadagidi territory? Absolutely.

And did that father know he had a daughter newly arrived over here, in the target zone?

Less likely, unless the Ajuri had simply phoned the Kadagidi and said, “Oh, by the way, we shall visit Tatiseigi this week. We shall greatly appreciate quiet while we do so.”

It did limit Kadagidi options in dealing with this uprisingc as uprising it was, even while it got a number of people past the doors.

And on that thought, darker human worries leaped up, despite all thoughts of kabiu, thoughts that kept him mute and obscure in the general exchange of greetings and courtesies. Dammit, the outright artillery or bomb attack on this peaceful gathering that kabiu called unthinkable was in fact perfectly conceivable to atevi, or what in all sanity was the point of them all coming here and laying their bodies on the line to prevent it?

And was there anything the Ajuri could possibly gain in the scheme of things, except by coming in to take Tabini’s side, when Tabini’s heir was half Ajuri? Did they fear that young Cajeiri would be killed, and that the clan would be sucked into a bloody feud willy-nilly on Tabini’s side of the balance?

They were clearly moving closer to power. The old lord, frail as he was, was no candidate—but Damiri’s uncle, Kadiyi, had a strong presence, and if anything happened to Cajeiri’s other guardians, he certainly could assert himself as a relative.

Bren remained worried and silent, listening to the polite social chatter as the aunt settled down next to Ilisidi and chattered on, and (a flurry of servants with chairs and teapots) as Meisi settled in beside Damiri and Deiaja plumped down beside her. “Did you have a safe trip?” Oh, yes, no difficulties, but going by road was such an uncomfortable way to travelc discussion of absent relatives, another cousin in childbed and oh, so much regretting not being here— For God’s sake, Bren thought, as if the whole undertaking were a family picnic.

Then, then his ears pricked up at a few chattered bits from the half-Kadagidi girl: Uncle Murini was still in the capital. Indeed, said Ilisidi, brows lifting. And oh, yes, in the last few hours, the aunt said, he had called the tashrid to assemble and come into session.

The tashrid, the aristocratic half of the legislature, the half that approved successions and heard challenges and Filings.

It was the body that initiated a declaration of war or called for a Guild action.

“Has he the numbers?” Tabini asked, meaning, knowledgeable ears understood, the quorum and the favorable numbers of date and attendance to conduct any legitimate legislative action.

“Indeed, no, aiji-ma. The lords, being no fools,” Damiri’s uncle said, “are many of them finding travel difficult, mysterious breakdowns, disruptions in the rails between their homes and Shejidan.”

“Not to mention,” Aunt Geidaro said with a wicked smile, “an outbreak of sore throat circulating in the capital itself, a remarkably contagious affliction. It travels by telephone.”

Tabini looked amused. Others laughed. Bren, seeing that look of Geidaro’s, felt a band loose from about his heart at this strangely conspiratorial tone from a woman who had personal ties to the Kadagidi.

God, were they winning? Were there disaffections? Was resistence against Murini rising up in the capital itself, among the lawmakers?

And in this thawing of manner did he detect a certain glee in the Ajuri attitude toward the situation, and possibly—possibly, to judge by the aunt, even a little rift within the Kadagidi themselves, a resentment rising toward their power-grabbing lord? Was that what the Ajuri were here in such numbers to signal—full participation, and maybe some special connections for this little clan to contribute or to claim, by being here in such numbers?

At least the legislature itself seemed to be having second thoughts, taking a cautious, though stingingly public step away from Murini, a small step starting with, doubtless, a brave few. It was a step which—if their unity held, if their numbers were sufficient, if fear that Tabini might come home and demand an accounting had begun to trouble their thoughts—might infect still others with this sore throat.

But such a movement in the capital might throw fear into Murini and start other forces maneuvering, might it not—perhaps recklessly and desperately so in the rebel south coast and the loyal west coast, where armed force might come into play?

And just when had this disaffection begun to whisper through quiet meetings, with nudges and glances and backroom whispers?

Perhaps it had come the moment it became clear the dowager and the heir were back on the mainland and were receiving support from two and three clans.

Perhaps it had begun when it became clear a growing number of dissidents from Murini’s rule were all gathering here, defying calamity, daring Murini to do anything and suggesting by their growing presence that he couldn’t. Maybe the Ajuri represented a power struggle within the Kadagidi clan themselves, increasingly alienated from Murini, the more he tried to be a national leader and compromise their particular interests— that had happened in the past. What was the proverb? Kaid’ airuni manomini ad’ heiji. It is hard to see the provinces from the capital.

“If one might suggest,” Bren said, ever so cautiously, “if there is any phone link possible to the Guild, nandiin, perhaps the aiji might at this moment seize the initiative to inform them—”

“The aiji needs no lesson!” the lord of the Ajuri snapped, cutting him off.

“Grandfather,” Damiri said, a gentle intervention for which Bren was personally grateful, and in the same breath the ferule of Ilisidi’s formidable cane came down hard on the tiles.

“My grandson is no fool, to ignore advice,” Ilisidi said.

Then Tabini, in that distinctive voice that could knife through a parliamentary brawl, said, “The paidhi-aiji has a sensible point.

Hear him.”

A hint? A momentary caution, when favor and disfavor were on a knife’s edge?

The aiji needed desperately to keep the peace and not create difficulty with these clans.

“With most profound regard for the lord’s wise caution,” Bren said, trying not to hyperventilate, “and the aiji being most sensible of the true situation—the paidhi-aiji should go to Shejidan, to present the facts he has brought back from the heavens, namely that, without the mission the aiji ordered, the business with the human settlement would have brought foreign enemies to the world—a threat which—”

Tabini himself lifted a hand, stopping him right there. Bren braked, brimming over with facts and figures Tabini apparently had no interest in hearing or allowing to be heard, not here, not now, or not in front of these witnesses.

“Aiji-ma,” he said, and subsided into silence.

“We understand your position, nandi,” Tabini said with finality.

“Go speak with the staff.”

And do what? Bren asked himself. He had wanted out of the gathering. But he was dismayed to be so unexpectedly dismissed.

And say what to the staff, and learn what? He murmured a courtesy, nonetheless, and rose and bowed to one and all, finding he was truly, absolutely exhausted, frustrated with a situation out of control, and personally out of resources, now that Tabini tossed him out of the gathering, and presumably out of the state dinner as well.

Was it now secrecy from the Ajuri the aiji wanted around that report of his? Why? Did Tabini suspect that Kadagidi connection?

He reached the door, heard a rapid footstep, and found the heir at his elbow, outward bound along with him.

“And where is our great-grandson going?” That from the Ajuri lord.

“He is leaving in good company,” Ilisidi said sharply, and with a blow of the cane’s ferule against the tiles. “We were all awake all night. Doubtless we shall get little rest tonight. We are weary, out of patience, and hungry. Sandwiches, Tati-ji. At least give us sandwiches, or hasten this dinner! No more sugar!”

“Indeed,” Tatiseigi said, ordered about in his own hall, and the dinner discussion proceeded as Bren quietly let himself and Cajeiri out of the room, in among the waiting bodyguards.

“My apologies, nand’ Bren,” Cajeiri said stiffly. “My mother does not agree.” And rapidly, in Mosphei’, a language an heir of the aishidi’tat probably shouldn’t have picked up quite so fluently, but had: “My father’s mad.”

That, Bren himself had picked up, quite clearly.

“I hope not at me,” he said in Mosphei’.

“At Ajuri clan,” Cajeiri said pertly, and, as they gathered up Banichi and Jago, along with young Jegari: “My mother is mad, too.

They’re pushing, is that the word, nandi?”

All these years, and an eight-year-old could read better what was going on in that room. He had suffered his moment of desolation, of being the outsider, at a time when he held some of the pieces that might make a difference—but he had lost all sense of the undercurrents in that room, and Tabini was right: He was being of no help and he had better get out of there.

“One is hardly surprised,” Banichi muttered in Ragi, at his elbow—Banichi and Jago alike understanding more Mosphei’ than they ever admitted. “But pushing whom, young sir?”

At that moment Cenedi caught up to them.

“More buses are coming,” Cenedi said in a low voice. “We have forerunners already at the eastern fence, nandi. We do not know the clan, but we suspect they are from the north.”

More buses. More lives at risk.

“We have had a report,” Banichi said, “that the Kadagidi themselves are bringing clans up from the south to join them at Parai.”

The Kadagidi stronghold. “Coming up by train?” Bren asked, envisioning rival clans having it out at the train station, if Dur came in at the same time.

“Sources say so,” Cenedi answered. Sources. Spies, that meant, perhaps observers inside the other household, or maybe spies at the train station—certainly observers at the estate fence. God knew how word of further movements was getting back and forth to Cenedi, but Tabini’s people had surely brought in far better equipment than Uncle Tatiseigi’s antique establishment owned, and reports were now moving in some security, not only on the estate and within the province, but very probably through channels involving Taiben in the west and north and maybe up into the eastern hills—so he surmised, at least, by the degree of information that Cenedi had gathered. Tabini had been here long enough to have spread out a network, given the usual efficiency that surrounded the aiji, and if that had started into operation, reports of hostile movements might become more specific.

“The aiji said in there that the hill clans are coming,” Bren said, information which did not seem to surprise anyone.

“Tirnamardi cannot hold any more guests,” Jago said. “Or feed them all.They have sent for more supplies from Marim, which also have to be safeguarded, and which cannot be quiet.”

Marim was an Atageini town some forty klicks east.

“Meanwhile,” Banichi said wryly, “there is a quarrel between Lord Tatiseigi’s domestic staff and certain of the aiji’s security as to whether there should be a formal dinner with others still arriving—the kitchen is in utter chaos, and many of the Atageini have come in without supplies, expecting to be fed.”

The kitchen was overwhelmed. So was he. Fatigue might play a part in it. The calculation that everything he could possibly learn now was secondhand and late had its part in it, definitely. He felt every one of his blisters and bruises, and wished he could do something, but clearly staff was well ahead of him and its emergencies were mostly of a practical nature. What would come next—whether the Kadagidi attacked again or waited—wasn’t even anyone’s immediate concern.

But one worry came crystal clear, and he had within reach three staffers he absolutely trusted. “Do we, nadiin-ji, rely completely on the aiji’s bodyguard? Do we know these new men, and does information flow?”

“Information does not flow to us so readily as before, nandi,”

Cenedi said. “We know them. They were lesser men in the aiji’s service before the calamity. But their man’chi is firm.”

“Capable men?”

He saw his staff’s faces, not quite impassive, admitting a slight worry on their part—a great deal of worry, one could suspect, if they were not in front of a not quite discreet eight-year-old who was waiting, all ears. The paidhi had expected a simple confirmation; if he were not so harried and dim-brained, he would not have solicited a detailed answer, and if staff were not so harried, maybe they would not have given it in front of the boy who been part of the furniture for two years.

Not to mention his teenage bodyguard, who had not been.

A rare lapse. Or not a lapse at all. The thought sped through Bren’s brain and Banichi’s large hand simultaneously landed on Jegari’s slight shoulder, drawing Cajeiri’s bodyguard into their circle. “Understand,” Banichi said, “we do not judge these men, your seniors by ever so much, to be in any particular unreliable, but they do not tell us as much as we would wish. When one accedes to a post unexpectedly, without briefings, and without equipment, it may make even an experienced Guildsman very nervous, little inclined to take advice, cautious of releasing information.”

“One makes every attempt to learn,” Jegari said, quiet under that grip.

“There is no blame for them,” Banichi said, “only a situation.

Listen, young sir. Even Guild, and they are Guild, can err by taking on too much responsibility and by refusing to consult. They will not abdicate their decisions and zig and zag with every breeze. That is a virtue, but when more experienced hands offer help and information, they insist on deciding, feeling the weight of their enormous responsibility, one can only surmise. They bring an improvement in communications. What the aiji’s guard knows, they have begun to share, this last hour, but they still keep too many secrets, and we have no idea how many more they keep. We would not like to see such errors in our own staff. Information should flow to us. It is necessary, nadiin, that information reach us.”

“Yes,” Jegari said breathlessly.

“We will stay close,” Cajeiri declared, at the likely limit of his understanding. “And if we had guns we could fight.”

“Your guard will have a weapon, young sir,” Banichi said. “As should be. And you will keep your head down.”

“Yes,” Cajeiri said, no lordly tone, just the quiet yes of a subordinate taking an order.

“Good,” Bren said.

“But we could tell my father’s men to rely on Cenedi!”

“They will defend your father and your mother,” Cenedi said sternly, “but they may not even extend that defense to your own valuable person, young sir. They take no chances on anyone they do not know, and you have surrounded yourself with your own security—including us.”

Paranoia meant trusting no one but themselves, and atevi paranoia meant knowing, though Cenedi did not say so, that a live aiji could produce another son, but a dead one’s policies would fall, taking institutions down in the process. One did understand.

“Dangerous,” Bren said. Trust the staff. Always trust the staff, or things fell apart. “They suspect us?”

“They will speak frankly to a few on Tatiseigi’s staff, nandi,” Jago said.“And of all the ones we would rely on—Tatiseigi’s staff is certainly not foremost in our choice. One wonders if there is some suspicion of all of us who have been on the ship.”

Young ears were still absorbing the situation, young eyes very attentive. A sudden glance caught the wheels turning in Cajeiri’s eyes—turning in silence, which was decidedly the most dangerous situation of all.

“Young gentleman,” Bren said, “rely on Cenedi, who has surely spoken to your great-grandmother.”

“I could talk to my mother,” Cajeiri said, jaw jutting. “She would talk sense.”

And the aiji-consort was Ajuri, not Ragi, and possibly expendable, if push came to shove, if there was purely Ragi aristocracy trying to preserve Tabini at all costs—and maybe not as happy with the Ajuri connection Damiri represented. If Tabini heard that set of priorities, a human guess said Tabini would skin his security alive.

The boy’s idea about talking to Lady Damiri wasn’t entirely foolish.

“Discreetly, young sir,” Bren said, one precarious step into defying the aiji’s orders and footing it around a cadre of persons who had established their own channels to the aiji’s authority, channels purposely excluding himc and possibly inclined to wish the aiji didn’t have a wife or an heir of Ajuri-Atageini blood.

But in that case, expending one human was negligible.

“Speak with extreme discretion,” he said, “counting that your father’s guard are not incompetent men—only very tired, and among strangers, and extremely concerned for your father’s safety for a very long time. They may care very little about us.”

“Well, we can speak to them and inform them,” Cajeiri said, and started off in that direction, but Bren gently snagged the boy’s arm and gained his momentarily startled attention.

“Young sir, no. Report what you have heard to your great-grandmother. That is your best avenue. You know your great-grandmother will find your father’s ear, and advise him far more cleverly than any of us.”

A series of thoughts floated through those young eyes, from astonishment to gratifyingly deeper and more shadowy things. It was not a shallow boy he dealt with: He staked his life on that.

“I shall,” Cajeiri said in great solemnity, recovered his arm, and straightened his coat. He stood straight and still, a credit to his great-grandmother.

“Be ever so careful who hears you,” Bren said. Standing on eye level with a precocious eight-year-old, it was frighteningly easy to make the mental slip into thinking Cajeiri older and wiser than he was; and maybe, he thought, his own size made Cajeiri more apt to confide in him. “But never assume, young sir, that your father has ever shown his true thoughts to us, not when he is in conference and not when so many important maneuvers are going on. He may have had good reason to wish me to leave the room, so he can talk with Ajuri without my hearing their opinion of me, which may be very harsh.”