Deliverer

Well, that was certainly as good an outcome as circumstances could make it. Bren felt better hearing that.

And, thinking of the breakfast he had also missed, he asked for whatever the staff might find. The young man assured him they were well-stocked, and proceeded to offer him three sweet rolls with jam, and warmed, to boot. He had those with the tea, feeling comforted.

He had one left when Jago came quietly into the compartment and sat down in the chair the dowager had left. He silently offered the remaining sweet roll to her, and she took it gratefully.

“How is the news, Jago-ji?”

“The plane to Cie is approaching the Divide, nandi.” The sweet roll immediately diminished by half, and a cup of tea arrived at her side to wash it down, with the other half. “The boy is resting comfortably enough. Staff remains with him, against any maneuver the plane may need to make.” The tea quickly disappeared. “He had a very limited view of the assailants, and still remembers nothing immediately surrounding the attack. He asked us more than once whether he should have jumped with the young gentleman in his arms. We replied that this might have been preferable, even lacking the skill to take such a fall. Broken bones would be a small price.”

A direct, an accurate answer, to a boy who might plan to enter their Guild. He understood that. “No Guild planning, surely,” Bren said, and Jago gently pursed her lips, grimly amused.

“No, Bren-ji.”

The kidnappers had made a raft of mistakesc including leaving the unconscious boys unsecured, possibly mistaking the dosage on the healthy teenager—or having no medical expertise in the company.

“Yet they evaded all pursuit and got into the air,” Jago said.

“They were not total fools, Bren-ji, nor should we expect them to be.”

“They had this planned, one thinks, before they visited the dowager’s table.”

Jago accepted another cup of tea, offered without request. “No midlander would risk this much, this recklessly. The fact that they have not involved Guild—this very strongly suggests Eastern politics, Bren-ji.” A sip of tea and a darker frown.“Still one must wonder if there may have been some approach between south and East. That remains the most worrisome possibility.”

The aiji’s Assassins had not located Murini. And the fact of Murini continuing at large was now beyond worrisome. It was a terrifying thought, that they might be decoyed eastward by the appearance of a kidnapping going east, and all the while lose track of the boy, who might have changed hands.

“Is there any cause to think this could be a decoy, Jago-ji? That the Taibeni boy could have been allowed to escape?”

“Cenedi has made inquiries in that line, and reports that a delegation from the Taisigin Marid did visit the East during Murini’s tenure—how those delegates were received, or even where they guested, was never clear. One suspects that there was contact between the southerners and certain of the Eastern lords. The aiji has made a Guild request at the highest levels.”

With a new Guildmaster in office, one whose politics were uncertain, and Algini, who was familiar with those high levels, out on the west coast, thanks to him. The thought upset his stomach, upset it extremely.

“Was the dowager aware of this visit when she invited these persons as her guests?”

“She may have been aware of it. It was difficult not to invite them, nandi, since they turned up in Shejidan, requesting audience.”

“A fishing expedition, perhaps, Murini’s contacts with the East,”

he murmured. Jago understood that metaphor. And it was logical Murini might attempt to find a door into the East: the East had always been a chancy member of the aishidi’tat. One could well imagine Murini would wish to find sympathy for himself there among those opposed to Tabini; but the trick was that Easterners were not well-disposed to each other, let alone outsiders, such as Murini was, equally with the aiji—and navigating the rocks and shoals of Eastern politics was a matter of connections as well as skill. “The question remains whether any elements of Murini’s man’chi might be directing this move—”

“Indeed,” Jago said.

“Or someone who connived with him now feels himself exposed—exposed enough to take desperate measures, considering the dowager’s return. One could be very uneasy, Jago-ji, asking oneself what the dowager might be walking into, returning to the East.”

“The dowager’s lengthy absence, rumors of her death, rumors of the aiji’s death, these might have been persuasive among her neighbors while she was gone. Indeed, nandi, issues have surely surfaced, since the dowager’s return from space— things that make particular sense to the East, and much less in the midlands.”

“But her neighbors would be concerned with the heir,” Bren said.

Cajeiri’s existence did many things—for one thing, it established Tatiseigi’s influence as major, and therefore raised the Padi Valley’s influence, Cajeiri being in their bloodline, too. It brought the Taibeni in.

And the dowager, meanwhile, being linked by fate, circumstance, and political necessity to that same Padi Valley region, might have stirred up certain individuals in the East, individuals who might not have been petted and cosseted enough by the dowager when they came to call—or who had seen reason to fear.

No, damn it, they had not cobbled a successful plot together on the spot. They had come in knowing what they planned and had used that visit to make contact with someone on the inside of Ilisidi’s defenses. This was not an impromptu business.

And beyond that, damn, it was a very deep pond to probe. An outsider had no idea what moved in Eastern politics. It was bad.

And his security thought Jegari should have taken his young lord in his arms and jumped: that was how dangerous they thought Cajeiri’s situation had become, how very dangerous it was to the aiji and the dowager and the stability of the aishidi‘-tat to have the heir in Eastern hands.

Not to mention the opinion of their visitors from the depths of space. The East hadn’t a clue what they were risking, in that regard, and would have no notion how to handle it if they ever gained the power they were after.

“Your computer is safe with the other equipment,” Jago remarked, finishing the second cup of tea. “Such clothing as I brought, Bren-ji, is shamefully dealt with. Staff attempted to assist.

There was no time. Staff at Malguri will have to press everything, but one can at least say that there are two bags of your clothes, with changes of footwear. More will follow, by tomorrow’s plane.

Cenedi assures us staff will retrieve it from the airport as soon as it arrives.”

“Excellent, Jago-ji,” he said. “One takes it the Guild is aware of this situation. Have we made any contact with the rest of the staff?”

“Regarding the Guild, yes, they are aware, nandi. Tano and Algini, however, remain out of contact.”

He had hoped—he had earnestly hoped they could recover those two to his staff before morning. That somehow they would have accomplished their mission and headed in. “We do as we can,” he said, and, entrusting her cup to one of the young men, Jago excused herself to go forward, back with Banichi and Cenedi and the rest of their security.

Time, then, to take what rest he could. He had never in his life been one to sleep on planes, always alert to any bump or thump in a flight, but having been waked out of his night’s sleep, he thought that with some determination he could manage. He put the footrest of the chair up and settled, at least until the sun coming through the shaded window had become a mild, pervasive light.

It was a long, anxious trip thereafter, the flight across the continental divide, and on across a sizeable expanse of wilderness.

The dowager slept through lunch. The boy slept. Bren went back into Guild territory to check on the youngster’s welfare—Jegari was resting well, injuries eased with ice, the doctor rousing him periodically to check his alertness, considering the concussion—and Bren detoured to have a look out the unshaded windows there.

Hills lay behind the wing, below them, in front of them. They were flying over an immense expanse of snowy, untamed land, a wilderness cut by rivers, but not by roads, except only one: the transcontinental rail, and they were following that course, not visible from this height and with the sunglare, but, knowing the general routes planes took, he was sure it was down there.

From the Divide, the land rolled down toward the Kadenamar, a vast river drainage, an immense fault that probably followed an old plate boundary—at least the experts had advanced that theory. In that wild, game-rich territory, still far ahead of them, the Kadena River’s ancient plateaus descended step by step to a wide and sudden lowland, a region of lakes in the north—old glaciation, the same experts said—with an expanse of boggy land to the south, a natural barrier which had held the East from the sea.

That geological fact had meant no ports, no seacoast trade. Every resource the East used was consequently bottled into a tract of habitable and rich land along the Kadena, the hills rich in minerals, the plains rich in game, the river margin rich in arable soil.

It should have been a paradise—if not for the history of equally bottled-up feuding clans, mostly situated in the lake country, above the fever-belt to the south.

And—invading that paradise—came the railroad, after the epic struggle of its builders, through tunnels and across bridges. Once across the Divide, the rail began to follow an easier route.

The greatest tributary of the Kadena, the Naijendar, started as a modest stream and a high scenic falls in the snowmelt of the Divide. It wove in other streams until it became a torrent, a whitewater flood that steadily gained volume and violence on its eastward plunge. The Naijendar had cut the route the rail followed, that, nowadays, planes followed for a guide—because civilization had followed that route, too, in the earliest regular trade between east and west, the ancient mountain trail, a precarious track rife with bandits and legends of buried treasure.

Malguri had gotten its early power by controlling that route—as the one convenient access to the mountain wealth of ore and, later, of water power and electricity. Malguri had begun as a medieval fortress perched high in the hills that overlooked the Naijendar, the lake it filled, the eventual rail-route—and now ran the modern airport that met the railhead.

In fact, planetary geology, ancient trade routes, and the hard-handedness of the ancestors had conspired to put the supreme power over Eastern politics into the hands of the latest Lord of Malguri, namely Ilisidi, grandmother of the aiji in Shejidan.

Oh, there were rival centers, dotted about the various lesser lakes and flatlands. They never had managed to get the better of their local geology, a few growing rich off trade, but that had to pass through Malguri. And the East had generally opposed the determination of the western atevi to get a railroad from coast to coast, to get that wealth of ores and game from the East to their factories and their tables. Not Malguri, whose lord had seen it would pass through his hands, going and coming.

The west, already carving its tunnel and laying track through the mountains on a collision course with Eastern culture, had started playing high-stakes politics with Ilisidi’s father.

The aiji of Shejidan had ended up not conducting a war, but marrying his way into that trade route.

The aiji in Shejidan had brought his bride west, probably hoping for her to keep enough of a claim on Malguri to prevent the East from falling apart, but never expecting her to become a force in western politics—or possibly—rumor had it—to aspire to rule the aishidi’tat. She had come damned close.

Ilisidi had been no fool, in anything. Her sojourn in the west had never loosened her real grip on Malguri—Malguri the province, not just the ancient fortress itself. Her neighbors knew who was in charge. The aiji in Shejidan had gotten a son of both bloodlines, and that son had gotten a grandson, Ilisidi’s grandson Tabini, who had yanked the southerners into the aishidi’tat. Now Ilisidi had gotten a great-grandson—who wove even more of the lineages of the aishidi’tat into his person, by bringing in the Padi Valley. And then she had gone off to space with that great-grandson, and if all the world had wondered if she or the boy would come backc the East had the greatest reason to worry.

The paidhi had seen Ilisidi’s Eastern establishment in action: he had visited that ancient heart of Ilisidi’s power, not half understanding at the time either the history or the current state of affairsc how Malguri was not only the fortress, with its handful of staff, but was the whole widespread holding, villages, towns, establishments, alliances—and control of the primary railhead and airport for the whole eastern subcontinent. He had not appreciated the commercial power and wealth that lordship over Malguri entailed. Now he did.

Not to mention the import of certain advantages out of the west into the East, like Guild support for the aiji-dowager. It was never in the interest of the Assassins’ Guild, the Messengers’ Guild, the Makers’ Guild, or the Merchants’ Guild or any other guild, for that matter, that anything should ever disrupt the hold Ilisidi had on Malguri and that Malguri had over the whole of the Eastc because she controlled the one point that kept the ore coming into the western manufacturies and held the rest of the East in check.

Damned right that the dowager’s two-year-long absence in deep space could have encouraged certain ambitious parties in the East to think that Malguri might finally be leaderless, that with Murini-aiji overthrowing Ilisidi’s grandson Tabini—the whole world might change shape. Even people who would never want to overthrow her authority might have started making precautionary alliances, when the west, for its own reasons, started going to hell in a handbasket.

Damned right that Ilisidi’s unheralded return might have caught a handful of her neighbors by surprise, some of them with potentially compromising recent histories, others vastly embarrassed to be in the company her agents might have reported they were in.

Her neighbors had come west to have dinner with her and welcome her home?

My God, how had the paidhi been so dim?

Damned sure that the aiji-dowager had not been overwhelmed by sentiment and gratitude that evening. She had had all her connections on display.

Now he waked to the currents that had been running at that table. He saw the whole pattern below them, in that thin white gash that was the Naijendar and the railroad, leading like a missile track to Malguri and all it meant to the aishidi’tat.

Stupid human. He’d been so preoccupied with the dangers in space. He’d taken Tabini’s power for unshakeable until he saw it shaken, and taken Ilisidi’s power for granted even after that example. Even Tabini, blood of her blood, had had to fight back the immediate western atevi assumption that Ilisidi herself, the mysterious Easterner, had the greatest motive to orchestrate this move, and the theft of her own great-grandson.

One could so easily think that, standing on a balcony overlooking the maze of roofs that was Shejidan, with all its convolute politics.

Looking down on the Naijendar, however—one found other perspectives that slammed western suspicions sideways.

Malguri had always played for power. It would do that now. It absolutely would. And Ilisidi’s neighbors hadn’t done what they’d done without the notion they could get something out of it and get away with it.

What? A share of power if they helped her hold the heir for ransom?

It was no more than what they had—a small range of political power for their transport-dependent little provincial centers. One could not even say capitals—provincial centers.

Provincial networks. Mines. The tradition-bound East would not even smelt the ore it mined. They were not industrial, like the west. They refused to be. They made choices that stemmed purely from the desire for raw resources, and the power to move them—or withhold them.

And they had that. If they left their province, they had nothing—nothing that they valued. So what did they want, that could let them deal with Ilisidi and make bargains?

He raked through memory, recalling what mines, what products, what raw resources the several lords shipped from their districts.

And unless there was more to the move than three lords, there was no way in hell they could arrange an embargo against the west if things went down to the trenches. Rival lords, their neighbors, would break it, and it would all fall to pieces.

More, Ilisidi could have gotten her great-grandson to the airport herself without breaking eggs, as the proverb ran. She could have snatched him off to the East with his two Taibeni attendants and used them to mollify the wrath of the Taibeni Ragi, who supported Tabini. Such a plot, with her involved, would not be running the way it had, half-assed and losing Jegari out the back of that truck.

Hell, no.

So back up. Retrace. There was no way this effort was going to win Ilisidi as an ally.

But what did the conspirators stand to gain? Overthrow Ilisidi?

Embarrass her?

That was about the most dangerous course he could think of.

Lure her East?

They were certainly doing that. If Ilisidi hadn’t been visiting Tatiseigi at Tirnamardi, the kidnapping would have— —might have involved Ilisidi as well as the heir. The plotters would have had to take on her security, or incapacitate them. They had not gone into the other wing of the apartment to take on Tabini and his guards, who were not a known quantity. They’d gotten in, and out, with some facility they shouldn’t have had, damn it.

Consider: if Ilisidi were no longer in the picture—the East fell apart, it bloody fell apart. That could have been one objective.

Chaos. And who benefitted from that? That thought led to some very bad placesc mostly in the south.

Except, if, down in that hotel, waiting their chance, the conspirators had heard through their sources that Ilisidi was leaving, and leaving behind the boy—who was heir to— Malguri itself, as it happened. Cajeiri was not only his father’s only heir—he was Ilisidi’s ultimate heir, the one who would have to succeed her—there was no other choice, since it was damned sure she was not going to cede her power to her grandson Tabini.

Damn, the boy not only united the bloodlines of the west— and stood to become aiji in Shejidan—he stood to inherit the keystone to the East, to boot.

Some of Ilisidi’s neighbors weren’t going to like that idea.

And that—God, that didn’t augur as well for the boy’s safety. If negotiations went wrong, if things started sliding amiss—it wasn’t good, was it?

Events were tumbling one after the other. They were in virtual hot pursuit, as it was. There had not been time to analyze everything. But was it possible the west—even Tabini—had been looking through the wrong end of the telescope?

He left his window, moved quietly to settle on the edge of an empty seat by Jago and Banichi.

He said: “The boy, nadiin-ji, is heir to the aishidi’tat. But from the Eastern view, he is heir to Malguri.”

“Indeed,” Banichi said.

His staff had a way of making him feel as if the truth had been blazoned in neon lights for everyone to see—and he always, always got to it late.

Still, he plowed on. “They would have wished the dowager dead, or in their hands. But whatever traitor there was on staff would have advised them she was in Tirnamardi. That left—”

For once, once, he saw a simultaneous recognition go through their eyes. It was a dire little thought they had not had. He had no idea what thought, but it evoked something.

“They would have learned that the paidhi had relocated, as well,”

Banichi said, “and that the aiji had moved in. They would have been fools to take on the aiji’s precautions. His own staff was around him.”

“While Cajeiri’s was mostly the dowager’s,” Jago said, “like the traitor herself.”

“You know specifically who it was, nadiin-ji?” Bren asked.

“A maid. A member of the staff,” Banichi said. “Pahien. The paidhi may remember her.”

“One remembers her,” Bren said. Indeed he did: a woman who found every opportunity to hang about the young gentleman’s quarters. Ambitous, he’d thought, someone who wanted to work her way up in the staff of a young man with prospects.

“She is probably on that plane,” Jago said darkly, and Banichi: “If they controlled the heir to Malguri—and anything befell the aiji-dowager—”

“The dowager may be in greater danger of her life than Cajeiri,”

Jago murmured. “It is entirely in the interest of the kidnappers that he stay alive, in that theory. And the dowager is going to Malguri. One does not approve.”

It was not the conclusion he had drawn from the same facts.

“Possibly they wish to coerce the dowager to take certain measures they favor, nadiin-ji.”

“That would be a dangerous move on their part, Bren-ji.”

To attempt to deal with herc damned certain it was. She was a knife that turned in the hand—her husband had found that out.

“If she were dead, on the other hand, the lord of Malguri would be a minor child—in their hands.”

“Balking the aiji in Shejidan as well,” Jago said. “If the aiji were to disinherit his heir, it would have calamitous effect in the west, and no effect at all in the East. He would still inherit Malguri.”

“Has Cenedi advised her against going? Will she remain inside Malguri?”

“Advised, yes, but by no means will the dowager leave this matter to her security, nandi,” Banichi muttered. “Cenedi cannot persuade her. Our Guild is already in Malguri Township, moving to secure various of her assets, but it is not even certain that our landing at Malguri Airport will be secure. One hopes to have that news before we land.”

He had not thought of that point of danger, but it was good to know the old links were functioning. “Can Guild possibly intercept that plane on the ground?” he asked.

“If Caiti were only so foolish as to land at Malguri Airport,”

Banichi said, “it would be easy. Cie, however, will take time to penetrate. And one regrets we will not have time. Planes fly faster above than vehicles or mecheiti can proceed in the weather there.”

“Then they will land unchecked, nadiin-ji?”

“Very likely they will, Bren-ji,” was Banichi’s glum assessment, “for any effective purposes.”

“Is there any chance of our going in at Cie?”

“They will surely take measures,” Banichi said. “We cannot risk it, Bren-ji.”

The Guild was not given to suicide. Or to losing the people they were trying to protect. Almost certainly there were Guild resources in Cie or moving there, but Banichi was not going to say so: the only inference one could draw was that there were not enough Guild resources there to protect the dowager or to effect a rescue.

He nodded, quietly left his staff to their own devices, and returned to the dowager’s cabin.

There he sat and brooded, among shaded windows, with only his watch for a gauge of time or progress. Eventually, after a long time, the young men moved to rap on the dowager’s door, doubtless by prior arrangment.

Cenedi entered the cabin, then, glanced at that door, then said to Bren: “The plane we are tracking, nandi, has entered descent, not at Malguri’s airport, nor even at Cie, but at a remote airport up at Cadienein-ori.”

“Still Caiti’s territory, nadi, is it not?”

“And a short runway, nandi,” Cenedi said. Cenedi did not look in the least happy, and must have heard something on the com, because he left for the rear of the plane immediately.

The dowager meanwhile emerged from her rest, and settled in her chair.

“The plane will land at Cadienein-ori, aiji-ma,” Bren said.

“One is not entirely surprised,” the dowager muttered. “They must trust their pilot.”

It was a scarily short airstrip for that size jet. Bren knew that much.

He imagined that if the Guild had scrambled to get assets as close to Cie as possible, they were now moving upland by any available means, to get to that small rural airport. One was not even sure roads ran between Cie and Cadienein-ori: in much of the rural East, lords had roads between their primary residence and a local airport, but freight might move entirely by air, these days, and the configuration of the roads was more web-work than grid.

One often had to go clear back to some central hub to go to a place only a few miles across a line of hills from where one was.

Cenedi returned after awhile, and bowed. “They have landed, aiji-ma, at Cadienein-ori. They undershot the runway, attempting to use all of it, and the plane seems damaged and immovable. There is only one runway. And it was iced, with heavy snowfall.”

No way for anyone else to get in, with a large plane blocking the runway. No way for them to land, certainly, except at the regional airport, in Ilisidi’s territory: their going in at Cie was no good, now.

And whatever the Guild had just revised their plans to do was now blocked by a disabled plane.

By accident or arrangement, Caiti had gotten farther out of their reach, and out of reach of Guild intervention. It was not to say that the non-Guild protection the lords of the East had at their disposal was unskilled. Far from it. And now how did anyone get in, with the weather closing in? One hoped that they could land.

“So,” was all the dowager said to that news, except, “Would the paidhi-aiji care for a brandied tea?”

“Indeed,” he said, agreeable to anything that pleased the dowager and settled her nerves.

So he waited, full of questions, knowing he would not be the one to ask them, and believing that the dowager herself might not have all the answers. Caiti had most of them at the moment. And at this point they hoped the young gentleman was in Caiti’s hands.

“Thank you, nadi,” he murmured to the servant, and accepted the glass. He took the merest sip and waited for details, if details might come.

In a moment more, Nawari came in, and bowed.

“Nand’ dowager,” he said, and with a second bow, “nand’ paidhi.

Three cars met that plane. The emergency slide had deployed. But there was some further delay to remove the luggage from the plane and take it with them in the airport bus. All passengers seem to have left.”

“Effrontery,” was Ilisidi’s comment, regarding the baggage. “Was there sight of my great-grandson?”

“Not that was entirely certain, nand’ dowager,” Nawari said.

“Members of the party were shaken up in the landing. And precisely where that car went afterward, there is as yet no report.

It left southward, as one would going to the Haidamar or the Saibai’tet. One small bus pulled away from the column, its whereabouts and direction seeming to the southern route, as one would go to the lowlands. It may be Lord Rodi leaving. Or Lady Agilisi.”

“Pish,” Ilisidi said. “We know. We have every confidence my great-grandson is wherever Caiti is.”

“Indeed,” Nawari said, “aiji-ma, it seems likely that he might be.

The majority has gone on eastward.”

“Tell Cenedi we will go to Malguri as planned. Tell the staff prepare. Have that car tracked.”

“Nandi,” Nawari said, and went back to deliver that instruction.

It might or might not be a diversionc but the dowager’s strength had its limits. They had to believe the boy was there, that he had not been taken off somewhere else. The dowager chose to believe it.

At least, Bren said to himself, that plane was safely on the ground, and if the car had gone south—the direction of either of Caiti’s domains from that highland airport—at least the plane was down, and there had been no ambulances.

Under present circumstances, however, the Guild was not in position to act, and no one could be surprised that the occupants had simply driven away, no one preventing them. There were three minor airports besides that in Malguri province. Cadienein-ori was not the largest, not by a hundred feet of runwayc not unless they had improved it since the last time he had sat on the Aviation Board.

So effectively Cadienein-ori was shut down at the moment, with that very large airplane stuck in the snow somewhere on the only runway that would remotely accommodate any airplane bringing Guild to address the problem.

And if the Guild intervened with too much fire and smoke and failed—it would alienate the very people most likely to be of use getting Cajeiri out alive: the neighbors and rivals who most naturally would cooperate to Caiti’s disadvantage. In the East, there were always rivals. Shejidan had grown up in the west and gathered provinces around it, an anomaly of politics and centrality and old history of associations, but it was not a pattern the East had adopted, not to this day.

And one didn’t get anywhere good in the East by forgetting that.

If either Rodi or Agilisi had left the party, it might be because that lord had gotten cold feet. And that might be an asset, a chink in the conspiracy that might be useful. Or it might mean something else, including even spiriting the boy away elsewhere. It needed observers in place to know that.

Would Tabini be moving his own agents into the situation in greater force? Was there a second plane behind them?

Maybe. But Tabini had already made his opening move, in sending him in with Banichi and Jago. They were the aiji’s eyes and hands in this situation. Aside from them, one reasonably expected everything would work through Cenedi and his men, men who operated here because they came from here and knew the rules. If the aiji did send Guild out under the Shejidan seal, things they needed on the ground would mysteriously break, fail to appear, go missing, or simply fail to reach a destinationc that was the way of things. Even Ilisidi would make no heavy-handed moves of Guild in the East, and the few other lords who did employ Guild employed them mostly quietly. Getting her great-grandson out—no lord alive would deny her the right to try, and nod quietly and move to her side if she proved she could do it without annoyance to themselves.

But it was all very delicate. Power rested in the will of a very loose confederation of lords, and she was one of them, but there was no council in the East. There was no legislature. There were no widespread and unifying laws. Every estate of every lord of every province was a feudal holding without an acknowledged central overlord, except the ancient dominance of Malguri. Certainly not all the neighbors would have agreed with someone kidnapping the heir of the lord of the West, as they called the aiji in Shejidan—and if someone disturbed their local way of doing things by bringing war to the region, the ones who did it would gather ire upon themselves.

But it was not guaranteed they would get help from anyone at all.

So that plane was down safely. People had left it alive. Good hope to this hour it was not a diversion, and the boy was where they thought, and not handed off via that mysterious car to some plane bound for southern territory. In that, the weather became their ally. Getting anything in or out was not easy.

In the meanwhile he sipped his brandied tea, and Ilisidi gave orders for a light meal all around. Her young men hurried about business in the galley, and soon food issued forth from the galley, going fore and aft. The presentation for him and the dowager was immaculate, the linen spotless, and the sole topic of conversation during what amounted to an extravagant teatime was the weather and the reports of snow at Malguri and across the uplands—much as if they had been planning a holiday, nothing more strenuous in the trip.

One complimented the young chef—who, indeed, was also part of the dowager’s security team: one complimented his choices, one enjoyed tea, and really wished not to have had the earlier drink—fatigue had the brain fuzzing, the ferment of emergency and impending crisis proving just too much after a night short of sleep.

They were not that far from Malguri. The paidhi had to think; and he still had no idea whether something was proceeding on the ground, some Guild operation to rescue the boy, or how Jegari was faring, or what Tabini might be up to while they were suspended between heaven and earth— Or what they were going to do next, if somehow they had missed the boy at the airport, followed a lure instead of the real thing and let Murini’s faction get its hands on Tabini’s son— The dowager held a conference with Cenedi, after tea, one that named names, notably those of her dinner guests, and inquired about transport, and the reliability of the service at Malguri Airport.

“A bus will be waiting, nandi,” Cenedi assured her.

The bus. God. The bus up to Malguri: that was one tidbit of information, that they were indeed going to the dowager’s stronghold and not the long way around the lake to the other airport—a long trip in; but he had forgotten the upland bus, and that road.

He excused himself aft, looking for more substantial information.

Jegari was sitting up—had had a sandwich, being a resilient lad, though he was a little subdued, and probably muzzy and confused with concussion. Banichi and Jago got up from their seats and proved amenable to questions.

The answers, however, were simply that they knew no more than before—not unlikely, if a Guild operation was in progress, and still short of its mark. They would not radio it hither and yon about the country, nor would this staff. Their own plane was, indeed, about to start descent toward Malguri Airport, near the township, and somewhat below the fortress that ruled the province.

“We do what we can,” Banichi said. “We have taken precautions.”

“When we leave the plane, Bren-ji,” Jago added, “stay with us.

Nawari and Tasi will see to the boy. Cenedi will be with the dowager.”

Meaning he was to move quickly and not encumber his staff; and that they did not take for granted a safe move between airplane and bus. He entirely understood, and went forward again, where the dowager was busy putting on her coat.

He did the same, no time to be wasted.

He had hardly finished that operation before the nose of the plane began that gentle declination that warned they were going down. He settled in a chair, as the dowager did, and falling into her mood, he said nothing at all as the plane descended, asked no questions and expected no answers. The plain fact was, staff believed they were going in to a landing in which the dowager theoretically controlled the ground, and from which presumably Cenedi had had satisfactory responses, but they took nothing absolutely for granted.

Nor, he told himself, should the paidhi delay a moment once his feet hit the ladder.

The plane arrived in a gentle landing and with a slight oddness on the runway: snow, Bren thought; but with the sound of the tires as they came to a full stop, he thought, in some dismay— ice here, too.

They stopped, eventually, and taxied back and around. When the plane came to rest and the dowager got up; Bren got up, taking his computer with him. Meanwhile the thump of doors and hatches advised them that the crew was scrambling to get the plane opened up and the passengers needed to move out at all deliberate speed.

He led the way back into the central aisle, and picked up Banichi and Jago.

“We shall go down first, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, and he made no objections: the dowager was too precious to risk drawing fire, in the case something was wrong here—one hoped some of Ilisidi’s people were in place outside. He felt the cold waft from the door as it opened, and they went back to the rear, where Ilisidi’s young men stood. The ladder had pulled up to the plane in an amazingly short time, considering it was not located near the terminal; and he drew in a breath and exited, sandwiched between Banichi and Jago, moving fast to get down into the shadows below the blinking running light from the nearer wing and the tail.

A half-sized bus arrived out of the darkness and stopped with a squeal of tires. Two uniformed Assassins bailed out and held the door open, and Bren climbed the steps. A clatter on the ladder above announced another party debarking, which, by the time they had gotten into the back of the very small bus, proved to be Jegari and his two protectors.

Last came the dowager, to be settled into the front seat, with Cenedi and the rest of the crew, which filled the little bus. There were no headlights. There were still no headlights as the bus pulled away and headed away from the plane, gathering speed, across the unmarked snow.

They crossed what might be the bus’s own tracks, passed a wire gate at high speed, skidded on ice on a shallow turn, banged a curb, and then the headlights flared on.

Bren exhaled a breath, realized he had the computer clutched in both arms like a panicked schoolboy, and studiedly settled back into the bench seat, with the fever heat of his bodyguard one on each side of him. The side of the terminal loomed as a gray stone wall in the headlights, then vanished sideways as they swerved again.

Malguri’s regional airfield was nothing like the metropolitan surrounds of Shejidan. The whole assembly was a huddle of stone buildings, a garage, a freight warehouse, snow-veiled and capped with white. Snow was piled on either side of the roadway, and the snowfall was gaining on the most recent scraping. Malguri sat at altitude, and winter was in full spate here.

They reached the outer road, and took the fork that led to the highlands. Breath frosted the windows. Wipers beat a frantic time against falling snow, and the engine hiccuped and growled alternately as it struck deeper snow—God, he knew this vehicle.

They had never replaced it. They had gone to space. Traveled to the stars. And this damned bus lived.

“Have we heard from staff at Malguri, nadiin-ji?” he asked his bodyguard.

“They are waiting for us, Bren-ji,” Jago assured him. “There will be food, and a bed tonight.”

Food and a bed was not the sum of his worries. “The young gentleman—have we learned anything, nadiin-ji?”

“Guild is pursuing the situation in the north, nandi,” Banichi said.

Upward bound, then. They whined their way through a drift, made it onto the road, bumping and jouncing.

The drive from the lowland airport to the heights of Malguri had figured in shipboard nightmares—it was still that potent. And that had been in good weather. He had repeatedly seen the view of a particular chasm and felt the vehicle tip under him, one of those edge-of-sleep falls that associated itself most firmly with folded space, the terror of losing oneself in nowhere.

It couldn’t possibly, he told himself, be as bad as he remembered it. And the driver would be more cautious with snow on the ground.

By no means would Cenedi tolerate any real risk to the dowager. It was simply the memory of an islander grown too spoiled, too used to paved roads. And they had the injured boy with them tonight—his injuries now well-wrapped, but by no means should he be jostled.

The bus bucketed fairly sedately along the first snowy climb, headed up small canyons, along reasonable curves. He ought, he thought, to be ashamed of himself—hell, he knew mountain roads: he’d grown up with them, well, at least on holiday. In that long-ago day he’d been anxious about his situation, was all. He’d transferred that anxiety to the busc The vehicle suddenly swerved, bringing empty air and distant scrub into his view beyond the headlights, as the bus tipped. He’d swear the wheel had found a road-edge gully under the snow. And ice didn’t improve the situation. He heard the wheels spin as they made the corner.

“God!” he muttered, and heard Cenedi sharply caution the driver and threaten his job—unprecedented.

Things settled markedly, after that, a number of sharp curves, but nothing so alarming—until they veered off on the Malguri road and nosed up toward the hills.

Bren’s foot crept to the stanchion of the seat in front, braced hard. Banichi, beside him, had a grip on the rail of the row in front.

They hit ice. The driver spun the wheel valiantly this way and that and recovered, then accelerated, for God’s sake. They rubbed the snowbank, and in a bump and a shower of snow they plowed through a small drift, with empty, snowy air on the left hand.

Cenedi leaped to his feet and, very rare for him, actually swore at the driver.

He could not hear the driver’s response; but one began to think that perhaps the driver had a reason for anxiety, in the dowager’s unannounced return.

Not to mention his own presence. The paidhi-aiji was as popular here as the plague.

The bus slacked its speed, however. Cenedi stood behind the driver, and one of Ilisidi’s young men had gotten to the fore of her seat, braced between her and the windshield.

There was something wrong, something decidedly wrong.

Banichi, too, got up, eased out and went forward, leaving Jago behind, as the bus reached a slower and slower speed, proceeding almost sedately now.

The driver, whose eyes Bren could see in the rearview mirror, looked wildly left to right.

“Down,” Jago said, beside him, and suddenly flattened him to the bench seat. “Bren-ji, get down.”

Ilisidi’s guard was, at that moment, shielding her with their armored bodies.

The tires, Bren thought, flattening himself on the seat, were highly vulnerable. Welcome home, was it?

Jago slipped down and squatted down in the aisle next to him, her hand on his back. “We have contacted Djinana,” Jago said, naming one of the chief operatives in charge of Malguri Fortress, where they were bound. “He has contacted Maigi, and others of the staff, and other staff at the airport. They have the road secure.

They met traces of intrusion onto the road, but these are now in retreat. None of us believe that Caiti would be such a fool. This was a local piece of banditry.”

“Banditry!” Welcome to the East, indeed. That a handful of individuals severed man’chi and set up independent operations— my God, he thought: the mental shift, if not psychological aberration, that that act required— And in Malguri District, itself, no lessc “Very ill-considered on their part,” Jago said.

“Against the dowager, Jago-jic”

“One doubts they are from Malguri itself. More likely, they emanate from among the neighbors, and have taken advantage of the dowager’s absence.”

He took her reading of the psychology on faith, faith that it would not be wishful thinking behind that assessment, not from Jago, who could at least feel the undercurrents she met. He was all too aware at this precise moment of missing a critical sense, being totally blind to what others read. He tried to figure their situation, lying there with the possibility of shots flying over his prone body, trying to reason where such bandits would come from—from among the neighbors, some overambitious second nephew with no prospects? Or some wildcard from among the reasonable neighbors, who just wanted to wink at such activity in a neighbor’s domain and gather profit from outright theft? That might have worked in ancient times, when there was open land. One did not move in on the vacant lordship of the aiji-dowager and expect to prosper, not even when Guild affairs had been in a tangle and a usurper had overthrown the dowager’s grandsonc But anachronism was the heart and soul of the East. If it was going to happen anywhere, it would certainly turn up here, where modern plumbing was still controversial.

“The driver has heard rumors in the township, almost certainly,”

Jago said. “Your staff puts no great credence in these threats of banditry—if such there be at all, Bren-ji. There may have been mutterings. Some associations may be greatly disturbed by the dowager’s return.”

“One understands so, Jago-ji, but—to come on her land—”

“Once the dowager is home, there will be phone calls among the neighbors; and there will assuredly be apologies from the bus company.”

About the wild driving, perhaps. Or about not advising the dowager’s security that there might be a hazard, and forcing them to get their information from the dowager’s estate—after they might well have run into an ambush.

They were still all crouched on the floor—except the driver and dowager, except those physically shielding the latter. The boy Jegari was kneeling in the aisle with the rest, supported and protected by two of Ilisidi’s young men.

“The driver is operating on rumor?”

“We do not know the accuracy of his fears,” Jago said. “That will be determined. Certainly he should have stated his misgivings to the dowager’s security at the outset, and did not. That is a fault.

That is a grievous fault.” The bus swayed and skidded slightly outward around a sharp curve. “Instead, most charitably, Bren-ji, he hoped to get us there alive without betraying certain individuals—so that the issue would never arise. One would surmise these people talk much too loudly, and the driver has gained at least peripheral knowledge of ambitious behavior in the district.”

Ambitious behavior. Not banditry. So he guessed right in one particular. “So what the driver heard might lead under the certain doors, do you think?”

“It will certainly be interesting to know. One doubts the company will get its driver or its bus back for a number of hours, Bren-ji—possibly Cenedi will send it back to bring your wardrobe, when it arrives on the next plane. Perhaps one of the house staff will drive it. The driver may need protection. One will attempt to determine that before sending the man back.”

The dowager had been away for two years, completely out of touch, while the district around her estate thought they had found a power vacuum, that was what. The realization that she was alive, and resuming her old power, had tipped a balance back to center, leaving some, possibly including Caiti, caught in an untenable position. The noisiest of the rest had now to decide whether to try to pretend nothing had happened—a dangerous course—or they had to make a move to become powerful.

And how that meshed with the overt action of Caiti and his companions—that was a serious, serious question.

And if certain of the neighbors, namely Caiti, thought they could make no headway with Ilisidi, and if they were still operating on their own, the dowager’s strong responses might drive them to more desperate actions, like linking up with Tabini-aiji’s opposition, specifically the restless south, Murini’s supporters—if they could demonstrate they had Tabini’s heir, and were willing to play that game— Dark, desperate thoughts, with one’s face down against the seat cushion, and the bus tires spinning in a drift of snow.

If the kidnappers could demonstrate the dowager’s power had declined, it might, for one, tilt the ever-fickle Kadagidi, the clan of Murini’s birth, Tatiseigi’s near neighbors, right back into the anti-Tabini camp, at the very moment the presumedly anti-Murini faction in that clan was in charge and negotiating with Tabini for a political rapprochment. And at the same moment, the East might start to disaffect and join the association of the south, the aishidi’mar.

It could break the whole damned business open again and create another armed attack on the aiji’s authority.

Not to mention that Cajeiri was at the present in hostile hands and they had quasi-bandits in the neighborhood.

Oh, this was not good.

He saw Banichi move farther forward, encouraging the driver, whose progress was far more sedate than before. Turn after turn, an incident or two of spinning wheels and a slow climb, and Jago looked up, and got up onto the seat.

“Malguri,” Jago said, and as Bren lifted up and tried to see the gates, Jago’s hand pressed him right back down.

“Let us clarify the situation first, Bren-ji.”

He stayed put, deprived of all sight of what was going on, until the bus slowed and turned on what distant memory read as the very front approach to the fortress.

Then he made another move to get up, and Jago did not intervene. He sat up, seeing, like a long-lost vision, a place that had been home for a brief but very formative time in his career, the nightbound stones just as grim, snow-edged, now, the upper windows alight—there were no lower ones, in this house designed for siege and walled about with battlements. Ilisidi stood up as the bus came to a halt, her security parting so she could have the view from the windshield. The front doors of the house opened, and staff came outside, bundled against the cold, as the bus opened its door and let Cenedi out.

Ilisidi came next, Cenedi offering his hand to steady her steps.

The boy Jegari got to his feet, with help, and managed to get down the aisle as Bren worked his way forward behind Jago.

Down the steps, then, in the dark and the snowy wind, a breath of cold mountain air, and carefully swept and deiced steps. The inside gaped, with live flame lamps.

Malguri, heart and soul. Yellow lamplight and deep shadow of centuries-old stone, nothing so ornate as the Bu-javid, or Tirnamardi. If there was color on the walls, it was the color of basalt, red-stained and black, rough hewn; or it was the color of ancient tapestry, all lit with golden lamplight. A table met them, bearing a stark arrangement of dry winter branches and a handful of stones, underneath a tapestry, a hunting scene. The air inside smelled of food, candle-wax, and woodsmoke. Servants met them, bowed. This was Ilisidi’s ancestral home, her particular holding, and the place in the world she was most in her element. She accepted the offered welcome, and walked in, and up the short interior steps.

Bren recognized those servants who welcomed them, and pulled names out of memory. He stood while Banichi and Jago surrendered some of their massive gear to servants— they would never do that in another household, not even Tirnamardi—and then turned back to deal with some issue that had occupied Cenedi as well, diverting their attention from him, as they would in no other house but the dowager’s. Other servants had taken Jegari in charge, fussing over the wounded and now wilting boy and taking him immediately upstairs—straight to bed, one hoped, after a little supper. Bren meanwhile followed the dowager to the formal hall, where a fire burned in the hearth, and more servants stood ready.

Ilisidi sat down in her favorite chair before a roaring fire, a chair set precisely where it had always sat. Bren shed his coat into a young maid’s hands while another servant dropped to her knees and applied a towel to his boots—just short of the antique carpet—all deftly and quickly done. He took his own seat by the fire, afterward, settling his computer by the chair leg, and accepted a cup of tea, as the dowager had done.

Safe. Behind walls. Cenedi was out in the foyer attending some necessary business, Jago and Banichi were with him, and one could imagine they were supervising the removal and handling of heavier luggage, and possibly the removal and handling of the bus driver, who clearly knew things he had not told them.

Ilisidi meanwhile enjoyed her tea in decorous quiet, in her first moments home, then asked the staff about the weather reports—snowy, nandi—and the snow pack in the mountains—very deep, nandi. An excellent year.

“Good,” she remarked, and there was no question from staff, not about her missing great-grandson, not about her precipitate arrival, not about her wounded young guest or the company of the paidhi-aiji, or even gossip from the township and the very things that Cenedi might be asking the driver. Information had doubtless already passed—or would, behind the scenes, to Cenedi and his staff. Tranquillity settled like an atmosphere, that bubble of not-quite-blissful ignorance that surrounded lords of the land. One anticipated a briefing, and a thorough one when it was ready, but one sat and drank one’s tea like a gentleman in the meanwhile.

“We should advise the neighbors we are in residence,” was all the dowager said on the matter of business. And when the tea pot was empty: “Join us for supper, nand’ paidhi.”

“One would be extremely honored, nand’ dowager.” He took it for a signal to depart for the while, and picked up his computer, rose and bowed—no question of when supper would be, but he clearly was not dressed for the occasion, and needed to remedy that. He bowed a second time, received the dowager’s gracious nod, and took himself out, across the foyer and up the stairs, attended from the outer door, not by Banichi or Jago, who were conspicuously absent, but by the trusted staff that he had known before at Malguri—Djinana and his partner Maigi, both welcome faces, somber in the grim news that doubtless had already run through the household, and concerned about the business that had brought them here, but clearly glad to see him.

He had not, he noted, heard the bus start up outside.

The assigned rooms upstairs were, he was glad to see, his old ones—the cozy little sitting area, the historic bedroom with its snarling hunting trophy, and the bed in which historic murder had been done. He longed for that bed. Oh, he longed for it. He had left his own somewhere in the small hours before dawn.

But he had to dress for dinner instead.

His was a string of rooms, all in traditional order, the short hall beyond leading to the bath and the ancient accommodation, as the word was. He did reasonably hope for a bath before dinner. He settled on that as his ambition, and set his computer safely against the wall, next to his modest luggage that sat in the bedroom, already emptied—staff would be fussing his abused and meager wardrobe into respectability. He had both Djinana and Maigi attending him personally on a tour of the remembered premises.

“One has never forgotten, nadiin-ji,” he said earnestly. “One recalls your excellent care with great gratitude. The consolation of this unhappy circumstance is the chance to see you and these premises again.”

There were deep bows, several times repeated, and Djinana took the lead, indeed offering him the chance to bathe after his journey—he was very glad to agree, and shed his travel-worn clothes in favor of a bathrobe.

“How is the young man who came with us, nadiin-ji?” he asked, and Maigi assured him Jegari was abed, warm, and sound asleep after his ordealc a good report, a reassuring report. The boy was a hunter, a woodsman from birth—he would bounce back with more vigor than a slightly worn diplomat and translator might do under like circumstances.

Said diplomat and translator sank into the stone bath. Staff had remembered exactly the way he liked it; and he rested his head on the rim, soaking away, and wishing Banichi and Jago were able to enjoy the same.

They were not. They likely would not even stop for supper, whatever reconnaissance they were about, which might even entail leaving the grounds: he earnestly hoped not.

But to his surprise Banichi and Jago were waiting for him when, wrapped in a warm robe, he exited the bath to prepare for supper.

“Is there news, nadiin-ji?”

“None firm, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “Cenedi is still talking to the driver.”

“Regarding the dowager’s neighbors,” Jago said, deliberately cryptic, and he pressed no further. He was at least advised where the minefield lay—what topic might be bad taste in a civilized dinner. Hence the warning. The dowager owned the house, the dowager had the neighbors: the dowager would receive a report while it was still rumor and make the estimation—it was not his business, nor his security’s business. He only had his advisement.

Meanwhile his dinner attire, pressed and pristine and rescued from his luggage, was laid out neatly on the dressing bench, and Djinana and Maigi stood by to assist. He dressed as far as his shirt, his trousers and his boots, and Jago came and offered him his coat.

The pockets of that coat, when he put it on, were heavy on both sides, and very fortunately, it was stiff brocade, which did not collapse under the weight.

One burden was his gun, he expected: he hated carrying it, but it had been useful before; the other thing, a small unit like a pocket-com—he felt of it, not recognizing what it was.

“Keep it with you, one begs, Bren-ji,” Jago said, regarding the contents of that pocket.

“What does it do?”

“It locates,” Banichi said.

Well, damn. One of the mysterious units. And for dinner in Malguri. Cajeiri had been snatched out of his bed, and if he guessed correctly what this was, it was a means of location. If Cajeiri had had this about him—but what the hell did they expect inside Malguri’s fortress?

“How does it work?” he asked. “What am I to do?”

Jago held out her hand, and he brought it out of his pocket. It had a small, glowing screen.

With a dot.

“Like the one on the ship,” Jago said. “You are here.”

“The satellite reaches it,” Banichi said, the man who once upon a time had not cared whether the earth went around the sun or quite the opposite. “Keep it with you.”

Ship-tech, let loose on the planet, when the planet had swallowed all it could take, as was, a choking lot, enough to have overthrown Tabini and plunged the whole world into chaos.

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the other little gift, either, the one with the bullets. He didn’t at all like machinery plummeting out of the heavens and landing in atevi orchards he was responsible for protecting from such intrusions.

But that was the situation they had to work with—that or see chaos and overthrow in the aishidi’tat far ahead of any disturbance modern tech might make in the atevi culture. The aishidi’tat was still suffering aftershocks— And the boy’s welfare—Cajeiri’s—outright overrode ordinary precautions, workaday rules, even major ones. The paidhi was supposed to mediate and rule on the introduction of tech, not have it in the hands of his staff before he had a chance to study the question. He ought to forbid it. He ought to tell them shut it down, let it alone, let them solve the problem without it.

Things were too precarious, advantage too important.

He took the gear. He didn’t order any curtailment of its use. Any advantage they could get: that was his thinking, now, right or wrong. Speed in settling this business. News. News would do.

“There was that baggage delay at Cadienein-ori,” Banichi said darkly. “It may have involved the young gentleman.”

Shocking notion. They had the boy in a trunk? “Guild has gotten there?”

In force, he meant. And that was a truly stupid question and Banichi failed to answer it. Guild never mentioned where allied Guild was, not on a mission.

“We should go back downstairs,” Jago said. “Are you comfortable with that situation, Bren-ji?”

“Absolutely,” he said. Into the matter with the driver, and the source of their information—he did not inquire, having asked his one stupid question for the hour. They might tell him, but he decided his mental energy was better spent on the dowager, and on readying himself for dinner. If there was information to be had, it would properly come to the dowager before it came to him—and the dowager’s staff was not resting at all at the moment.

He looked forward to supperc and not at all in anticipation of the food.

10

There were appetizers and preserves, there was a presentation of game of the season, with triangular heaps of vegetables of varied colors—not to mention the sauces, the breads, the crackers and soups—there were three of the latter, each in small cups, the whole dinner service at a modest portable table set near the fire, just the dowager for company.

It was, Ilisidi remarked, snowing heavily out. The bus was still parked in the drive, and the driver was still in interview with the dowager’s young men.

And, exhausted by the mere sight of the pile of food, one had to sit waiting and hoping for what else the dowager might have learned, or guessed, or understood, besides the weather report. It was absolutely impossible to breach etiquette with a superior even at such an intimate supper.

But Ilisidi could do so, if she chose. After the formal compliment to the cook, and well before the after-dinner brandy, a message came, which was simply, in the words of the young man who delivered it: “It is Caiti’s summer house, nandi, in the Haidamar.”

“Well, well, well,” Ilisidi said, seeming to taste the words when she said them. She looked up at Bren, then, and gave a decidedly unpleasant smile. “My great-grandson is indeed with them, nand’ paidhi, and the name of the villain is indeed Caiti.”

That—however grim—was the best news of the day. They had guessed right. They had followed the right movement. “Whatever the dowager wishes to do,” Bren said, “the paidhi-aiji supports.”

“A visit, one thinks,” Ilisidi said.

To Caiti’s domain? Bren wondered in alarm, but the dowager took a serving of sweet berries, seeming unruffled.

In a moment more she remarked: “We shall call on my neighbor.

We have so seldom spoken in recent years.” After yet another bite she added: “Your presence is requested, paidhi-ji.”

The neighbor?

Which neighbor, of several?

That was the likeliest cause of the driver’s apprehension— trouble in Malguri’s own district. At least two pieces of information began to come together.

“Tonight, aiji-ma?”

“Tomorrow at first light,” the dowager said, and added: “Overland.”

Cajeiri had a bad, bad headache.

In the dark. Smelly, musty dark.

It was somehow and very surely not Great-grandmother’s apartment. That much was clear in all the overset of things that had been true when he went to bed. It was none of the confused sequence of places he had dreamed. Somewhere, he knew he had heard Jegari tell him he was going to leave him and would try to bring help, and the whole world had been roaring and moving, but a slit-eyed attempt to see where he was now produced no Jegari, no information but a cold, black space, the hard-padded surface he was lying on, and a thin wool blanket without a sheet or a pillow.

That was not Great-grandmother’s apartment.

He felt further, opened his eyes more than a slit, and felt an attack of nausea, not to mention the widening of the splitting headache, right behind the eyes. It was utterly dark. There were no sounds. This place was cold as the ship could be cold, but it smelled of age. Age—and what mani would call very bad housekeeping.

The silence around him was as curious. He had never been in a place this quiet. No Jegari, no Antaro, no staff. Just a drip of water.

Plink. Plink. Plink.

Well, it was scary. But it took more than dark to put him in a panic. He had been in the deep passageways of the ship, in a section with no lights, where it was colder than this. He had found his way through, had he not?

He heaved himself up to sit, hugging the blanket about him. He was as naked as he had gone to bed, and the blanket was scratchy, nothing of quality at all, besides smelling musty. His stomach felt more than empty: it felt as if it would like to turn inside out and his head was going to implode if it did. He had to concentrate for the next few moments on breathing and settling that feeling.

He was, he decided, about to be mad instead of scared. But being mad was going to hurt his head. So he tried not to be that, either.

He tried to think instead. That by no means helped his headache, but he needed to know where he was.

It was certainly no place he knew, that was foremost. Ship air was filtered and had its own smells of plastics and heat and humans, besides that the ship had no way to reach down and snatch him up. Great-grandmother’s apartment smelled throughout of fragrant woods and spices and dried herbs. This place smelled of cold damp stone and things decaying and dusty. And dripping, cold dripping.

It was a place few people cared to fix up. It was where they put things they did not care much about, either, that stood to reason; and they put him here. Unless it was the best they had, nobody he trusted would possibly bring him here for any reason. It was a dungeon, that was what. A real dungeon. Like in nand’ Bren’s movies.

Had not Jegari talked about getting help? But when had Jegari been here, and where had he gone?

He just could not remember. He thought he remembered a vehicle, but that was getting away from his memory the longer he stayed awake. And there were legs, dark legs, several pair, and more steps, and there had been a place that moved, and one that roared, and right now his mouth told him he was thirsty and his stomach told him he still wanted to be sick if he moved too fast.

But sitting still was no good. Just waiting for somebody bad to show up was no good.

A foot off the edge reached stone floor and knocked into what proved to be a wooden stool. Something fell off it. Feeling on the stool and beside it he found a metal bottle and a heavy hand-sized cylinder with a switch. He moved that switch, and light stabbed out at bare stone walls and a growth of something dark and nasty on the rock.

The room was cube-shaped stone, top to bottom, and there was a wooden door—a door that looked very solid. The little stool held one other item: a sandwich, and the metal bottle was a can of fruit drink. He might trust the can. He by no means trusted the sandwich, the thought of which turned his stomach anyway. Fruit juice—he might get that down.

Where were Antaro and Jegari?

Where had Jegari gone? For help. But he could not remember when.

They had been three, safe, comfortable, Fortunate Three, and now, wherever this was, wherever he was, he was One.

Alone. He never had been alone in his whole life.

And upset. And hurting. And sick at his stomach. And mad. And scared.

One was a Unity. One could not be divided. One could not be made into anything. It just was.

He wrapped the blanket around him, hugged it close to his chin for warmth and swept the beam about. There was cloth in one corner. There was a kind of a pit in the opposite one. There was a bucket, a red bucket next to the pit. He was lying on a kind of a bed, with a thin, worn mattress.

He got both feet on the icy floor, stood up, still dizzy, and investigated the door, the obvious way out. It was, no surprise, locked.

The bucket against the other wall was cheap plastic, with a metal handle. The pit in the floor was dank and foul-smelling—very foul, like the recycling tanks aboard the ship. He guessed what that was for, in the absence of other accommodation. It was like—it was like The Three Musketeers. It was like The Count of Monte Cristo. Only he had not guessed how bad the Chateau d’If would smell in real life.

The cloth pile he found was clothes, new and clean, and fairly well his size at least, and with them was a light coat and a pair of light, cheap boots, used ones. He dressed and put the coat on, warmer, and feeling a little safer, but it was cheap woolen clothing, and it was all a little too large—the long-sleeved shirt hung past his hips and the light coat covered his knuckles. The pants wanted all the tabs taken up as far as could be, and even then tended to drift downward. The cheap leather shoes—those were too large, too: the socks were at least heavy and warm. And all of it smelled musty, as if it had been stored somewhere and never washed.

There was no light in the ceiling. There was no switch by the heavy door, which proved to be locked from the outside. There was no window, nothing but a beamed ceiling that had collected ages of dust.

A dungeon, for sure.

Maybe on the other side of the wall was some other prisoner.

Maybe he could dig his way out.

Or maybe he could find a way out through the pit in the floor. He leaned over it and considered it, and it was just too foul down there.

More to the point, there was no updraft that would indicate it led anywhere but down into bottomless and unspeakable filth.

There was, however, a little trap at the bottom of the sole door.

But it wouldn’t lift. The opening was smaller than he was at his smallest. And he couldn’t come at any hinges on it: they were all on the other side.

So were the door hinges, to his disappointment: the door opened outward. And he tried the pull-tab of the fruit juice can to see if he could reach through to lift, say, a latch on the outside. It was not long enough.

Disconsolate, he sat down and had a quarter of the sandwich, deciding there was no need for poison, if they could just shoot him, and drugging him hardly made sense if he was stuck in here for hours and hours. But he kept it to a quarter, not knowing when they might feed him again, and he drank only enough of the room-temperature fruit drink to make the sandwich go down. He had been mad. Now he was, in fact, swinging a little back toward scared. He hoped Assassins had not killed his father and mother when they kidnapped him. He hoped Antaro and Jegari were still alive.

They would never get away with killing his father, if they had done that. His great-grandmother would come back from Tirnamardi with Uncle Tatiseigi—they would take over, and anybody responsible would be very sorry for that.

They would be very sorry, too, for putting him in this hole, once he got out.

He had the drink can, which could be valuable. And he had the metal pull tab. And then he looked at the metal bucket handle, but he thought that if they were halfway smart, they would miss that when someone came to do something with the bucket. He dared not go on using the flashlight, running the batteries down, so he took a careful survey of the place, got up and ran the beam down into the hole (horrid) and along the door seam, and looked even under the bed.

There was a shadow around a stone, gap in the mortar right in the middle of the wall, at the foot of the bed—a little stone, where it seemed there had never been any mortar, or maybe it had just eroded away, the place looked so old.

He didn’t know what might lie behind that rock, or how big the little stone might prove to be, but it was something to start with.

He took his blanket to sit on, and his can key, and started scraping away at it, hoping, as it wore out, that the people in charge would go on giving him fruit drink in cans.

So what would the Count of Monte Cristo do?

He switched off the light to save the battery. He could feel the spot without it, and he started chipping away, getting rid of the last bit of mortar, chip by little chip. The Count had spent years trying to get out. He was willing to, if that was what it took, so long as they went on feeding him.

If there was dirt on the other side, he could sweep it into his blanket and dump it into the hole in the corner of the room. He could dig and dig under whatever building he was in until he could hope he was outside.

Surely it would go a lot faster once he got one stone out.

If it was another room it let him into, that other room might not have its door locked.

At very least, it was a plan, and it was something to do, rather than sit in the bed and be scared.

And when he got out, oh, some people were going to be in trouble.

11

It had been a long, long time, Bren was well aware, since he had been in Malguri’s stableyard. His own mecheita, Nokhada, had nearly forgotten him.

Or she conveniently pretended to have forgotten. She towered aloft, a winter-coated, snaky-necked, and supercilious creature with jaw-tusks the length of a man’s hand. Her clawed feet ripped the straw of the stable-aisle, and she threw her head up, pulling at the restraint of two handlers.

The dowager was already safely aboard a younger creature, Babsidi son of Babsidi, a handsome mecheita of high breeding and elegant line, new to the dowager’s service.

Bren had the crop. He was in no patient mood himself, on a short breakfast and in frigid morning air, and, as it happened, he had refreshed his riding skills between their landing back in the world and their taking up residency in the Bu-javid. He took the rein, he targeted the stirrup he had to reach, whacked Nokhada wickedly on the shoulder, and gave the command while he was in motion.

A good thing two of Ilisidi’s young men were holding on: she squalled and tried to disembowel the foremost of the two, who was fast enough and strong enough to keep that head out of play. Bren popped the shoulder again with the crop, and a third time, hard—he could make a move for the saddle, and even get aboard while the young men held her, but if he let her get half of her way now, she would try for it with him for the rest on the ride.

And the shoulder dutifully dropped. The head shook, rattled the harness, lowered. Bren got a foot in the mounting loop and hit the saddle, rein in hand.

Nokhada gathered herself up then, a powerful surge, a deep sigh once she stood, and then she obeyed the rein, after he touched the offending side lightly. He was not fooled: he kept her under close governance. Nokhada had gotten the better of him on their very first ride, and forever hoped, after any hiatus, that she could do it again to a person of his size, never seeming to recall that he had since learned to ride.

Banichi and Jago were up on two of the same herd. They had four of the dowager’s young men, the dowager, besides Cenedi, nine in all, but the herd numbered twenty, and would go with them, four of them under packs, with portable shelter, considering the weather and the length of the trip and the rest just because splitting a mecheiti herd was more trouble than any handler wanted. They were prepared against a cold night in the open—or for a formal dinner and an overnight stay, if their intended host, who did not acknowledge having a telephone, proved reasonable after all.

They were bound, so the dowager said, to pay a social callc on Drien, the lady who hadn’t come to dinner in Shejidan. And after flying all day yesterday, they were up before the crack of dawn, kitted out and equipped for a minor expedition.

One gathered the lady in question had no desire to be contacted.

One gathered Ilisidi had a point to make and intended to make it unmistakably.

Why? he might have asked his staff once upon a time. Now he had a very solid notion that it was a good idea—just serving notice: letting the nerves that reacted to man’chi feel that the aiji-dowager was no longer light-years removed from the East. Getting up in people’s faces, as the saying went. A demonstration of who feared whomc and who needed to fear whom.

And sometimes such a meeting meant the judicious removal of an obstacle or shifting an association: earthquake, in the interlinking pattern of associations.

The paidhi didn’t need to ask, not after years of experience with the aiji-dowager. The paidhi didn’t say a thing, or provoke conversation, not with the dowager in her present mood. She was not reacting: she was thinking all the way, he was well sure of it.

She was thinking, and whatever she was thinking, the best the paidhi and his staff could do was exactly what Tabini had sent them to do—keep the Eastern Association intact. Keep war, that least likely of atevi interactions, from breaking out between districts.

Get Cajeiri back. That was only the first step.

Stable doors opened. The young men quietly let the restraining loops slip through the bridle rings. Free, Nokhada threw her head and swayed, blowing steam in the frosty air, and they surged for the door, to the peril of timbers and posts They rounded the corner for the outer pen gate: handlers swung it open, and in that very moment, in mid-stride, one short, brass-capped tusk gleamed in Nokhada’s lower jaw as she snaked that head around to stare at her rider from one dark, calculating eye.

Pop of the quirt and a retensioning of the rein: Bren didn’t even think about the choice.

Nokhada blew, threw her head and, raking and shoving Banichi’s mount, fell right in where she belonged, next to pale Babsidi and Cenedi’s black mechieta, and with Banichi and Jago riding right behind. Fighting for position in the herd. It was like atevi politics—it didn’t give a damn for anyone in the way.

God, he wished he’d tucked that last breakfast roll into his pocket, but he’d been afraid it would shed crumbs on the gun.

Snow came down on them, a sifting off the eaves three stories above. It was scarcely morning even so, a gray glimmer of dawn as they rounded the end of the building. Clawed feet gained scratchy traction on the occasional icy bits and sent the snow flying.

Nokhada, always ambitious, but aging, nipped a too-forward unsaddled youngster at the turn around the ell of the building, and the interloper dropped back in the order as Banichi and Jago moved up.

The bus still sat in the front drive as they passed, its roof bearing a thick blanket of snow. Its driver was a guest of the estate, so he had learned over such morning tea as the servants had brought in—which meant that the bus sat here rather than at the airport, and that meant that their spare baggage, and his clothes, would not make it up when they arrived. The driver had reportedly feared for his safety last night—with some reason, had been Banichi’s word on it. But Ilisidi would surely make it clear to the district that the driver was detained and threatened, and that would keep him safe from reprisals—who knew?—reprisals possibly from the very lady they were on their way to visit.

Jegari, who had not been informed everyone else was leaving, was still abed, probably still asleep, and Maigi and Djinana vowed to be sure he stayed there if they had to sit on him. It was a dirty trick to play on the lad, who now was a virtual prisoner in the estate, but the boy had told them all he knew, and there was no good dragging him along in a rough, cold ride.

This is an investigative and diplomatic venture, Bren had written Jegari in a note, to be given him when he waked. The aiji-dowager and the young gentleman alike will be best served if you remain in the house to await or relay messages. There may well be such and they may well be of extreme urgency. As a member of the young gentleman’s staff, you have a certain authority to answer.

The outer gates opened by remote, and let them out onto the same road the bus had used. The snow made quick going at the mecheiti’s long, clawed stride, with the mecheiti fresh and full of energy. But they didn’t follow the road all the way to the bottom, where it had branched off from the township road. Not too far along the downward course, they took a small downward spur that led off under a rock wall of frozen springs.

The trail, if honest trail there was beneath the snow, then led them down past evergreen and scrub: at best it was a path not often used, not in any season, by the look of it. The mecheiti’s clawed feet broke down barren winter brush, gained a sometimes chancy purchase on the ice near streams that made frozen exit from the rocks, and went where, very clearly, no bus had ever been.

It was at least four cold hours on that trail, with several very chilly breaks for rest, before they hit a service road, and two more with no sign at all of any dwelling or estate boundary. But that was the way in the East: civilization had large gaps, and roads passed through long spaces of empty before they got anywhere at all, not necessarily with convenient interconnection. Roads were historically nonexistent where there had never been association; roads were poor where association was loose, broken, or in name only.

And the two estates in question, Malguri, which was Ilisidi’s ancestral holding, and Cobesthen, which was Lady Drien’s, had, as one could well see, no well-established roads between them—no ties, no polite connections socially, not for a century and a half. The lady of Malguri and the lady of Cobesthen were cousins, legatees of a historical breakup, from a time when the two estates had been one power, centered at Malguri. The association had fractured—the murder in the bedroom at Malguri was not unconnected with this event, though in exactly what particular Bren was a little hazy—and the cousins, the only living relatives of their generation within the district, did not routinely speak, though sharing a common boundary.

The current lady of Cobesthen, Cenedi informed them, used a phone for outward communication, like ordering up vegetables or items of clothing from Malguri Township, but refused any message that came by way of such a device.

Drien did Tatiseigi of Tirnamardi one better in stubborn ecological conservatism, Bren thought glumly. One got the picture, one got it quite clearlyc and one would have wished to ask the dowager why the human in the company was being asked along if they were facing an Easterner with a particularly strong loathing for modernity, humans, and all that came from them.

Because Banichi and Jago were damned good at what they did, was one answer, and they would not leave him behind in Malguri at any order. The dowager surely wanted all the help she could get in this venture, and would therefore risk her neck and his to get it.

That was the conclusion he drew on the matter. He could not foresee any good he could do—his camping outside in the foyer for the duration of the interview might be a good move, once they got where they were going, except that Banichi and Jago would not leave him alone out there, either.

A highland lake lay off the eastern face of Malguri, down a gentle slope. That vast lake, remnant of some past glaciation and an eons-old fracture and uplift of the world’s crust, divided them from Cobesthen, which held the southern lake shore. They were short-cutting a jagged peninsula of the lake, as Bren remembered the geography, to get to Cobesthen, choosing the mecheiti rather than going by boat from the very beginning— from Malguri Fortress itself.

“Why ride?” he asked Banichi and Jago, during one of the rests.

“Why not take the boat across? What is the plan, nadiin-ji?”

They stood near the mecheiti, an isolate knot of warm bodies in a cold winter woods. Banichi lowered his head and answered quietly, “A boat, Bren-ji, could be prevented from landing. And recall Lord Caiti holds land across the north shore of the lake. Almost certainly he expects intrusion. The land is wider and affords cover. The lake while wide—is very flat.”

That was a thought.

“Do you think he would continue to hold Cajeiri there, within the—”

—within the dowager’s reach, he had been going to say. But he said, instead. “Bait?”

“Very possibly, Bren-ji. Continued proximity would make it irresistible.”

And would offer the greatest possible embarrassment to Ilisidi.

Caiti’s holding there was named Haidamar, the summer retreat on the northwest shore. Caiti’s lowland and more frequent residence was down in the lowlands to the west, the Saibai’tet. But the airport at Cadienein-ori served the northern territory, and, by extension, several mining concerns near the north end of the lake and downward—was there, in fact, even a road between Malguri and the Haidamar?

By his memory, there was not. Not on this side of the lake. But, God, he thought, looking out toward the snow-hazed lakeshore, dim through the trees—were they that close to the boy? Was holding him there meant to draw Ilisidi into a trap, to get her to attack across the lake?

She, in effect, had little choice but to move first, move fast, and try to do something; and that meant crossing another lord’s land, by a route that had no roads.

“Are we actually calling on Lady Drien, nadiin-ji?”

“If she will open her gates,” Jago said. “One believes we are, Bren-ji.”

They had, besides him and the dowager, Cenedi, Nawari, Banichi and Jago, and the dowager’s young men, having, one hoped, called in Guild to their assistance and relying on staff to protect the house back on the heights from a flank attack.

And were they going to pay a social call on their way around the lake’s far shore, possibly as a base to move against Haidamar?

Possibly.

And phone or no phone, he would lay a bet that Drien knew they were coming: a stubborn aristocrat who wouldn’t acknowledge messages that came by phone, wouldn’t respond, and hadn’t communicated with her cousin in the years when they had been close neighborsc would not be caught by surprise. The lady would know if something moved on her land, even in the dead of winter.

Her guard might not be Guild, but they could not be that careless, or that lacking in modern abilities.

The question was whether the lady had used that grocery-ordering phone to call the Haidamar and advise Lord Caiti she was being trespassed upon, by a certain number of persons intent on reaching Caiti’s land.

And had it been Drien who had set so-called bandits on the road to Malguri last night? Or might they have been instigated from Caiti’s side?

Ilisidi was uncharacteristically silent and cheerless as she rode, speaking only with Cenedi, and Bren let that situation be. Nokhada typically kept pressing to the fore, but he kept her back, out of the dowager’s way, figuring that if she wanted him, she would signal so. She didn’t, which said worlds.

The sun made a midafternoon appearance through the lowering gray cloud, a small patch of sky as they passed along the lake edge, where a snowy beach and a rime of ice afforded easier going than the woods. That was the warmth in the day, short-lived as it was.

By the time they reached the end of that beach, the gray had wrapped the peaks behind them and erased half the lake, giving the false illusion of a low, endless plain under a misty sky.

That icy mist rolled in off the lake with a sifting of snow, and, leaving the shore, they rode in fog, among ghostly shapes of winter trees, down a local road blanketed in snow. No vehicles had crossed here. The mecheiti’s feet turned up no ruts of wheels beneath the new fall. Even Jago remarked on that fact: they might have stepped back centuries, when mecheiti were the only transport in this district.

It was a lonely, lonely place, Cobesthen. It was isolation, failed prosperity. Ancient anger.

Eventually, around a snowy rock outcrop, they came on an iron grillwork gate, between two lowering and massive towers. Cenedi leaned from the saddle to ring an icicled bell and announce their presence—and one could almost hope the notoriously contrary lady of Cobesthen would open those gates and let them in, unpleasant as the encounter was bound to be. They had been in the saddle all day.

They had their gear to camp out here, but one gathered that the aiji-dowager did not intend to camp in tents outside the lady’s gatec not without taking some action for it.

Time passed. They waited, mecheiti shifting restlessly, nipping and shoving as they tended to do while, incredibly, finally, on the other side of the gate, a band of men rode mecheita-back toward them, a reciprocal force that might have ridden right out of the machimi plays.

Bren let go a long, long breath, facing these messengers, the East at its most obstinate. It was a wonder, in fact, that the lady had not stationed guards out in the old tower, to freeze winter-long on a lonely, outmoded duty.

But the fact she hadn’t said there was more modernity out here than met the eye.

They sat, they waited. The mounted group arrived, the leader asked their identity, and, receiving the reply from Cenedi, “The lord of Malguri,” that leader signaled a man of his who quietly got down and unchained the gate. It ultimately took the help of two others, who dismounted, forced the snow-blocked gate open barely enough to let them throughc no, Bren said to himself, that gate had not seen many comings and goings in recent days. The snow was up over the footing, and carved itself a deep arc when they moved it.

They passed that gate, with their pack train and their spare mounts, and the several locals afoot pulled the gate shut and noisily ran the chain back through, ominous sound in the foggy surrounds, before they got back to the saddle. They had wanted in. They were in. Who else the lady of Cobesthen thought she was keeping out was uncertain. One hardly liked the feel of it.

And if one disliked that, the silence of the guards and the general demeanor gave no better feeling.

The other side of the wall protected a small, youngish forest, well-kept, actually, though fog obscured the details and snow covered the ground. The lake should, perhaps, have been visible to the left, where the wall came up against a snowy rock outcrop, but fog had obscured everything into a dimmer and dimmer sameness as the sun sank and the snow came down with increasing vigor.

The house materialized out of that haze as they moved, a towered old mass of stone sitting on the lake shore, low-lying, with some sort of stone structure beyond it, on the shore itself. It was reputedly coequal with Malguri in age, or nearly so, older than that wall they had just passed. The only sign of warmth in all the scene was the glow of light in two windows on the upper floor: like Malguri, being built for seige, it had no lower windows, not a one.

Its doors, when they approached, were deep-set within that nasty trick of mediaeval architecture, a shooting gallery on either hand, the only apertures in the lower floor being sniper-slits.

That particular feature could still operate, with guns instead of arrows. But it was undignified to look up in fear. They came to a halt in front of the shadowed front door.

The dowager, helped down by her young men, straightened herself, took a firm, gloved grip on her cane, then walked, on Cenedi’s arm, up the icy steps. Bren slid down, finding his weary legs like stumps underneath him. Banichi and Jago alit, and Banichi shouldered a heavy bag from their gear.

Well, Bren said to himself, with a slight glance at Banichi and Jago, whose faces were impassive. Well, here we go. He walked the icy steps after the dowager, all the while conscious of the gun in his right pocket. He had no intention of giving that up. His bodyguard would let no one lay hands on him.

The doors at the top of the steps slowly opened. Inside, there was firelight—live flame, in lamps from a century before electricity, illumined the hallway. Brighter firelight from an open inner doorway cast a live sheen over the irregularities of slate flooring in the hall, and the austerity and appropriateness of the single hanging and the single, horizontally-mounted spear above it were downright chilling in their lack of mitigation or welcome.

One. A Unity of One was the declaration here. Kabiu at its simplest.

Arrogance. Solitude. Again, isolation from the world.

And absolute power at least within these walls. Malguri made a far, far different statement in its foyer, with stone and winter branches, a porcelain vase and a scatter of river stones: diversity, balance, harmony.

Bren read the arrangement, treading deliberately at the dowager’s back, and had the very clear realization that no human foot had ever sullied this floor.

Did the lady know by now that he was with the dowager?

If she knew there were visitors at her gate, and knew they were not the egg delivery from the lowland farms—which doubtless did not rate an armed escort—she indeed knew that detail. He did not expect a welcome.

But then this lady was not only scantly disposed to accept humans, as he recalled. She had been scantly disposed to recognize the fact that Ilisidi had married a westerner, more than half a century ago. This lady was still scantly disposed to recognize the existence of the aishidi’tat and the aiji in Shejidan, let alone welcome a stray human.

A maidservant met them inside that further door, and bowed.

“The lady wishes me to show you to your rooms.”

“We are not here to tour or dither about,” Ilisidi snapped, and the cane tip struck the floor with the sound of a rifle shot. “Where is my cousin?”

The maid looked as if she had rather be almost anywhere else. “If the dowager would be so good as to take cognizance of the offered roomsc”

“We are not good!” Ilisidi said. A second time the cane hit the ground. “We are impatient and out of sorts! Our great-grandson is in the hands of idiots! We assume our esteemed cousin is more intelligent than to abet this nonsense by delaying us in our search, and we assume she is not ignorant of the proceedings and the perpetrators! Shall we draw other conclusions?”

The maid opened her mouth, hardly looking up, then shut it, bowing deeply. “One will relay this sentiment to a superior immediately, nandi. Please wait.”

The maid fled at, for a decorous household servant, a very fast pace. They stood in silence, melting small puddles onto the slate floor.

A second servant, an old woman, came from the lighted room, and bowed. This was likely the major domo, who should have been the one sent to greet a guest of high status. Mark that down in the score.

A deep bow. “The house is distressed to report, nandi, that the lady is indisposed. She will see her guests at breakfast.”

Wham! went the cane. The old woman flinched, not raising her eyes.

“Cenedi,” Ilisidi said, and quietly, smoothly, Cenedi moved forward, oh, about half a step.

“We are at the dowager’s orders,” Cenedi said, and lifted a hand.

His men moved in the indicated direction, right toward the open door. Three set themselves in place to guard that door. Two more moved down the hall to take possession of that.

My God, Bren thought, and did not stare about to see what Banichi and Jago were doing. He had the nape-of-the-neck sense they were paying attention round about, not looking at him or at Cenedi at the moment.

The major domo, give her credit, stood her ground, though deferentially.

Ilisidi hardly paused to notice. She headed, with Cenedi, right past the woman, right toward a further lighted doorway, and Bren found nothing to do but follow her, with Banichi and Jago one on a side and very much on the alert.

They passed Ilisidi’s guard. They met another, inside the room, two women not in Guild black, but wearing firearms.

In an ornate chair by a fireside, the chair one of a set of three, sat a thin, aristocratic woman enjoying a cup of tea. A book lay face down in her lap. Her hair was liberally streaked with white. She wore half-moon glasses, slid well down on her nose, and looked up with a flash of golden eyes.

“Well,” the lady said, “one is hardly surprised at such behavior.”

“Where is my great-grandson?” Ilisidi asked, the cane in both hands.

“How should I know?”

“By various sources!” Bang! went the cane, end-on. “Neither of us is a fool.”

“What is that?” The lady took off her glasses and waved that object generally at, Bren feared, him. He decided it behooved him to bow courteously at this point, and look as civilized as possible in a slightly damp padded coat and outdoor boots.

“This gentleman,” Ilisidi shot back, “honors this house, as do we.”

“Guild guards and a human,” the lady scoffed, looking down her nose. “You dare dispose your hireling guards under my roof!”

“Your roof by tolerance, cousin. Your grandfather—”

“Leave my grandfather out of this, nadi!”

Ilisidi marched over to the other chair and sat down, damp traveling coat and all, cane braced between her knees. “Tea,” she said to the servants.

There was a lengthy pause. Lady Drien sat still, and sat, and finally lifted the slim, jeweled fingers of the hand that rested on her chair. A maidservant bowed, turned and walked to the large standing tea urn, an impossibly ornate thing that looked like a silver dragon with brass belly-scales. Bren followed the motion only with his eyes, watching hands as the maid prepared and filled two cups, and brought them back on a cinnabar and blackwood tray.

Ilisidi accepted. Drien accepted. There was a space of decorous silence while the two sipped and thought.

Drien set her cup down first, click. Ilisidi’s followed, click. There was another moment of silence.

“Remarkably early snow,” Drien said.

“It makes searching inconvenient.”

“Gods unfortunate! Impatient even at your own disadvantage!”

“There is a boy, your own cousin, badly handled by the likes of Caiti and other fools, and you are prepared to be tolerant of this circumstance! We are appalled, Cousin!”

“I had no part in your decision to bed down with western barbarians! Anything you got of that error is not my concern!”

A small pause and a dark stare. “My great-grandson remains your cousin, Drien-daja. Blood is blood.”

“Unwillingly!”

A longer pause. “Your neighbors came under my roof presenting compliments,” Ilisidi said. “They entered under our residence. They sat at our table. They complimented our cook. They spoke disparagingly of you, in particular.”

Drien’s nostils flared. “So cheap a ploy.”

“But true, nandi. They said nothing specific against you— certainly nothing quite accusatory. But one is certain they were perfectly willing to do so, had we indicated we were at all willing to hear it. They later suborned a maid of our staff, a woman with ties to the lowlands. Perhaps they threatened the woman or her relations to gain her cooperation. She breached the doors. She admitted them by way of the servant accesses.”

“Perhaps she was a lowland scoundrel.”

“Ah. Indeed. Perhaps she was. Or perhaps she harbored an honest grudge against us. We only fed and housed her for four years, for very little work. During the last two, with Murini sitting in authority in the Bu-javid, perhaps she began to form other man’chi.”

“Then back you come, like an old bone, several times buried.”

Ilisidi laughed silently. “We are extremely hard to bury, cousin.

You know that. You declined to come visiting with them. Why?”

Drien seemed, reluctantly, in better humor. She snapped her fingers, and the maid collected the cups for another round of tea.

The whole room stood still while the two indulged in yet another cup, and the cups went, click and click, down on the side tables.

“My great-grandson,” Ilisidi said, “is faultless in this dispute, Drien-aba. I have ridden a snowy road to enlist your understanding in this matter.”

“And you bring this under my roof.” Drien made a flick of the finger in Bren’s direction, almost without a glance, as if she were disposing of lint on her sleeve. “To sleep here! How dare you?”

“One relies on your adventurous nature,” Ilisidi said dryly.

“Nothing affrights you, Drien-aba.”

“Nothing affrights me, nadi, but this abomination offends me.”

“Bren-paidhi.” Ilisidi moved her hand, and indicated his place beside her. He walked over to the side of her chair. He bowed to her, moreover, with perfect understanding of the degree of inclination requisite.

“Well-trained,” Drien said. It was the word one used of a mecheita.

“Drien-daja.” Bren offered a second bow, perfectly impassive.

“One is honored to address the lady of Ardija.” That was the district name. “If my presence offends the lady, I shall lodge with the servants.”

Provocation. Deliberate, and he could all but feel Ilisidi gathering her moral force should Drien take him at his word. Ilisidi would have him in her own quarters before she sent him to Drien’s staff: he was sure of that.

“Sit,” Drien said sharply.

That was a thunderbolt of protocol. He bowed a third time in courteous deliberation and took the third chair. Ilisidi, in the tail of his eye, simply signaled to the servant herself for another round of tea.

It came. They all three drank.

“So,” Drien said. “Was it for amusement, cousin, that you brought this foreigner under our roof?”

“It was for your edification, cousin.”

“Indeed.” A brow lifted, rousing an architecture of wrinkles.

“Mine? You go traipsing off to the heavens and associate with humans. You mingle in their affairs at their behest, and they reward us all by picking quarrels with still other foreigners—after which, my esteemed cousin returns to the world to cry alarm and take up habitation with—what is the lord’s name?”

The chairs were set in a triangle. Bren had a fair view of both ladies, and sat still and tense. But a hint of wicked still humor hovered about the dowager’s mouth. “Which one?”

Drien’s eyebrow lifted. “Oh, come now, nadi. There can be no such abundance of midland lords.”

“Your gathering of gossip seems at least adequate.” A sharp frown came down between Ilisidi’s brows. “Where is my great-grandson, Dri-daja?”

“Why apply to me?”

“Because there was a reason you did not join Caiti. What was it?”

“Recognition of fools in action.”

“So you knew what they were going to do.”

“One had not the least notion. Foolishness has every direction open to it. Wisdom is much more limited in choice.”

“Well? What direction does our wise cousin take now?”

The lady held out her cup for a refill. Her arm hardly reached full extension before tea was in the cup. She sipped it thoughtfully.

“Perhaps not a direction. A position. Caiti was born a fool, lives a fool, will likely die a fool. And you let him to your table. But then you allow humans, too.” A small silence, in which Ilisidi said nothing. “Were you not aware, cousin, of Caiti’s ambitions? Perhaps if you visited your estate more often, you might become aware.”

“The thing of which we were not aware,” Ilisidi snapped, “was the corruption of my staff in my absence.”

“A child stolen right under your roof,” Drien said sweetly. “And whisked through the heart of the Bu-javid and the whole width of Shejidan. You are not yourself, cousin.”

“Where is he, Drien-ji?”

“One believes, with Caiti.”

“Where?”

“In the Haidamar.”

The lady, Bren thought, was extremely well informed—for a lady using live flame to light her front hall. And they had been detected at the front gate, quite readily: hell, they had been detected approaching the front gate—it took time to saddle a herd of mecheiti.

“One rather suspects,” Drien added, “that my neighbors fear Caiti.”

“Do you fear him?” Ilisidi shot back.

“That depends, ’Sidi-ji, on which side I take.”

“You call him a fool,” Ilisidi said.

Drien’s brow lifted. “He is. But there are more sides than two.”

“Consider mine,” Ilisidi said.

“I do,” Drien answered. “I choose to answer your questions. He was in the Saibai’tet, in his winter home, before he and his associates went to Shejidan. He takes residence in the Haidamar.

He knows you will come. And look to your safety if you do.”

The Haidamar, the fortress of Caiti’s domain, held the other end of the considerable lake. It sat on one of the rivers that fed into the north of the lake, had historically suffered from its easy access to the flatlands just beyond and had proved a soft target many a time, where it regarded forces coming up from the plains, but that meant, in the modern age, fairly easy access to an airport—and communications.

A schemer with allies, Bren said to himself, needed communications, and dared not bottle himself into a dead end like the Saibai’tet, which nestled on flat land eastward, where the foothills gave way to wide plainsc agriculture had been Caiti’s forte. Until now. Now it became something else.

“You think my great-grandson is with him in the Haidamar, nandi?”

“Possibly, cousin. One certainly might be very suspicious.”

“We have grounds for discussion, Dri-daja.”

“Do we? Perhaps we might manage a late snack. Will this join us?” With a wave at Bren.

“The Lord of the Heavens will join us,” Ilisidi said firmly. He had had better invitations in his life.

The stone came free. It proved to be about hand-sized. Cajeiri turned on his light for just a moment to have a look at his progress, which had created a little spot of darkness in an otherwise unbroken wall under the bed, and he lay flat on his side to look into it.

Inside, to his probing fingers, was more rubble, more crumbling mortar. He saw how it was, set it in memory, and cut the light off to save the batteries.

He had hoped to meet dirt right off, but it was still a start. And there was no use tearing his hands up getting straight at the rough rock inside. He had traded the bit of aluminum from the can for the metal bucket handle—that had been a struggle, getting that off—and he dug away at the next stone over, to widen his gap. He tried wiggling it. Nothing yet. He kept digging, raked out rubble, and it gave.

His backside was cold, his hands—he alternated using them—were miserable and approaching open wounds. But work and hope kept him warm, and he had made progress. Where the hole was going, he had no idea. How long it would take, he had no idea, but he had learned—Great-grandmother had confined him to his room no few times—that it did no good at all to pitch a fit or wait for relief. What did count was to find a job and keep at it, and to be just blithe and cheerful when summoned out and try to better his situation—he doubted he would get such an offer from people who had lodged him with a scratchy blanket and a single sandwich.

He could do what he set his mind to: Bren-paidhi was no bigger than he was, and Bren got along, and made people listen to him, and got through where bigger people failed. It was just technique, that was what Banichi would say. Just technique, and keeping one’s mind centered right on the job at hand.

So—putting Banichi’s lessons together with great-grandmother’s—he was making progress of some sort; he meant to get things on his terms. He was hungry by now. That hardly mattered.

And, much faster than the last, the next stone wiggled in its mortar jacket, ever so slightly.

He heard footsteps, the first sound of life he had heard in this place. They were coming. He shoved his rock back into place. He scrambled back out from under the bed, lay down under the blanket, kept his grimy hands under the covers and looked distressed and sleepy.

The lock rattled to a key, and opened. Someone came in with a potent flashlight.

He shielded his eyes with a blanketed elbow, squinted up pitifully at two men, one of whom had a tray. Servants, clearly, but he was going to remember those faces.

“Is he ill?” one wondered, and the other said, “Only sleepy.”

The man with the tray set it down. Cajeiri coughed and looked as pathetic as he could manage.

“My medicines,” he said. This was a ploy he had seen amply demonstrated in the human archive. “I need my medicines.”

“We should report it,” one said. And for just a moment Cajeiri thought of making a break for that open door, but he had no idea what lay outside. They were believing him. They felt of his face.

“He has no fever, nadi.”

That was a problem. Cajeiri thought of the biggest, most uncheckable lie he could fashion. “I was in the heavens, nadi.” A cough. “One has to have medicines, for years after. One will die without them.”

“What sort of medicines, boy?”

“One has no idea,” he mumbled. “The doctor gave them to me.”

He doubled up, still under the blankets. “My stomach hurts. Oh, it hurts.”

They wrapped the blanket around him. The door was still open.

And perhaps it had not been too smart—if they got a look at his hands. Or looked to see where he had gotten all that dust. He rubbed it off as he clutched the blankets, rolled over, and he could see a very barren, rock-walled corridor outside, uninformative except that this was not a very fancy hallway.

“One begs, eat your supper, boy. It may help.”

“It makes me sick. Oh, it hurts.”

“We had better tell the major domo, nadi.”

To his disgust, one stayed with him while the other ran that errand. He continued to hold his stomach, and took only a sip of water when offered, even if he was starving.

“Where is this place?” he ventured to ask the sole servant.

“We are not to answer questions, young sir.”

“It is a very poor place, clearly.”

“It is by no means poor, young sir!”

He had stung the man’s pride. And consequently he learned something, at least. Not a poor place, indeed, a place with a major domo, and servants. Something else occured to him. The food smelled a lot like a dish Great-grandmother liked, spices from her side of the world.

“I think it is very poor,” he said. “And clearly you are not Guild.”

“The Guild has no power here.”

That was the East, and the servant was a fool, or thought he was. He remembered Great-grandmother saying that in the East, some lords refused to employ Guild, but that the Guild infiltrated them anyway: it took just a bit more work.

“My great-grandmother will know what to do,” he said, and doubled tighter. “Oh!”

“Lie down. Lie still.”

“It hurts to lie down, nadi. And when my great-grandmother finds out you failed to give me my medicines, you will wish you had Guild to protect you. She will be very put out.” All the while his mind was racing. If there were Guild, the man’chi of the Guild to his father might say that his father’s son was not to be kept in a basement—for that matter, the man’chi of the Guild might argue that this was an illegal action, and Guild could not support it. It was one thing to kidnap someone. It was another to kidnap the aiji’s own son, a minor child: he had studied the law. Mani had thumped it into his head.

But nobody had caught Murini yet, and there were definitely people who wanted to kill his father.

The Guild had pulled support from those people. That was a scary thought, that there was one other group of people besides the Easterners who might not use Guild these days, or who might employ Guild who were no longer following the rules. It could mean that he was in the south, and that the household cook had just bought Eastern spices imported in. Maybe these people were tied to Murini-aiji, and rogue Guildsmen were out there somewhere: nand’ Bren’s people had killed the Guild leader who had tried to subvert the Guild into backing Murini—but there were definitely some of that man’s followers loose.

The man had said—had he not—that the Guild had no power here. That was hard to parse: it could mean either thing. But the spicy aroma was a vote for Eastern. And a stone dungeon? That was more Eastern-like, too. In the East people hated human conveniences—like bathrooms with real toilets and electric lights that ran without a local generator. He knew about Malguri. If they wanted electricity, like for the Guild to run some of their equipment, they had to fire up the generator, because no wires came up from the township. He had that from Great-grandmother.

He had been appalled, hearing it. She had been making the point that he was too soft. Maybe he was, but one reasonably expected lights to work when one flipped the switch. And they had a plastic bucket, and used flashlights instead of candles. That said this place or these people were not that kabiuc Footsteps came back. The first servant came in with a man of some authority, and they felt of his forehead and checked his eyes and felt his pulse.

“He says spacefarers have to have medicine,” the man who had stayed with him reported, and the other two asked all the next questions, concluding with: “He says he has no idea what he takes.”

“Move him upstairs,” the authority said.

Well, that was certainly a disappointment. Not at all what he wanted. He wanted someone in authority to turn up so he could worry them. Instead they gathered him up, blanket and all, and took him out into the hall, letting him walk, which he did slowly, marking every detail of what was surely a basement.

They went up a short stairs, and into an electric-lit, inhabited hall, the plain sort of hallway that said servants’ quarters, and maybe kitchens, a place with modest items of kabiu. They brought him to a door, and inside what was someone’s room, which had a single glaring electric bulb in the ceiling—the room belonged, he gathered from what they said, to a junior servant, who would double up with one of the others. They set him on the bed and carried out the little dresser, which, besides the bed, a portable toilet, and a small straight chair, were the only items of furniture.

They brought his supper up, and set it down on the chair. They brought a metal water pitcher. That rated a little interest. But he tucked up on the mattress under the bedclothes and feigned misery.

He simply had to start over, was all. And up here the rooms were closer together, and he knew where the next room was.

And here there was electric light, but the switch was not in the room. Damn.

There was no window, either. That was not good. The walls were plastered. There was probably stone underneath.

They called a workman to reverse the lock in the door. That took a while. The food would be cold, if he wanted to sneak a bite or two.

They brought him another couple of blankets and piled them on, so he was too hot.

They left, finally, leaving the light on. He got up, took the spoon from the tray and had a couple of cold, disgusting bites, which helped the hunger, nonetheless.

They might not miss the spoon. It was, he thought, silver. That was a conductor. He had electricity. That was a good thing. The switch was on the outside of the room. That was a stupid arrangement, if it was regularly a bedroom. But probably it had been a storeroom of some kind before it had been a servant’s room.

But he had a chair. A bed. A spoon. And a portable toilet, which was a disgrace and an embarrassment.

Besides that, he had the bucket handle, which he had kept under the blanket with him.

He was locked in.

But electricity and light: that was certainly looking up. The air was warmer. And the bare overhead bulb, far up out of his reach, at least worked.

And he was ahead by one other thing. He had a reasonable glimmering where he was: the East. And he wondered why the East, and he thought of the mysterious dinner guests. Which led him to think of Great-grandmother, and he remembered how Great-grandmother was with Uncle Tatiseigi, since right after that dinner party. Then his father and mother had moved in with Great-grandmother’s staff, and Bren-nandi had moved out, and things had gotten boring and disgusting, but then— At that point his memory of what had happened had a big hole in it, one in which Jegari and Antaro disappeared, and he found himself here, in what smelled and tasted like the East, which had no tie to anything in his recent life except that dinner party.

If Great-grandmother had wanted to bring him here, she could have just done it, easily.

So it was definitely somebody Great-grandmother would not approve of, and possibly something her recent guests had to do with.

Something could have happened to his father when they took him out, but he thought not, somehow, because these people were locking him in and being very careful not to tell him anything.

That meant they were afraid of somebody finding out.

And that probably meant his father was all right, and that Great-grandmother was, and that they would be looking for him, and so would the Guild in their employ.

Well and good. The Guild getting involved was a good thing. That would be Banichi and Jago, and Cenedi and Nawari, none of whom would take his disappearance lightly. And he would enjoy seeing them take these people to account.

This level of the place was much more occupied. People came and went outside. Voices reached him. It was harder to know when someone might come in. What he really, really needed was a wire.

A nice long conductive wire that might reach that door latch. He might almost manage it with the bucket handle, but it was not long enough. And there was no other metal available but the dinner spoon.

So in the meanwhile he got down under the bed and took the bucket handle to the plaster of the adjoining wall. It wasn’t too bad a place to be changed to.

Plaster was a lot easier than mortar.

It was not the servant’s quarters Lady Drien provided them, nor yet was it Ilisidi’s degree of housing, one could well imagine. It was a modest, though gentlemanly room that allowed a man and his staff to dispose their baggage and settle, at least enough to dress for dinner.

“The staff, Bren-ji,” Banichi informed Bren, while Jago re-braided his queue, “is by no means Guild and resents our presence, conceiving us a threat to their lady. This is a house belonging to the aishid’itat only by convenience, and only as long as convenient.

They fear us, one can reasonably surmise, and very much hope not to be set against us.”

“There is, however, news,” Jago said from behind him.

“News, yes, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, folding his arms in an attitude of thought. “We are not at the moment in communication with this staff. But we have heard, since being here, a small item or two which persuade us that Caiti tried to enlist the lady, and failed. At least he came here and was rebuffed. This we find encouraging.”

Particularly encouraging, seeing that he prepared to share the lady’s table, in an absolutely classic machimi situation. Or it could be a tidbit the staff had intentionally let fall— Banichi and Jago would not be off their guard in the least, nor should he be. “One certainly hopes not to be poisoned tonight, nadiin-ji.”

“They know we would take revenge,” Jago said. “And that, Bren-ji, is why your staff does not share the table.”

They had brought their own rations, in the baggage. Prudent, Bren decided. He wished he personally had that option.

But he had delayed about dressing as long as he dared. He had washed off the grit and scent of the trail, had arrayed himself in a fine lacy shirt and a good coat, not to mention the soft house boots.

He headed out and down the hall, looking fairly splendid, all things considered—he caught his reflection in the antique mirror at the landing, pale individual flanked by two looming shadows, Banichi and Jago, in their polished Guild black and silver.

He was a little behind the dowager. She and Cenedi were in the process of admittance to the dining hall as he arrived downstairs, and the major domo, who had escorted her to her seat, came back and gave him a curt wave of the hand—not quite sure of the protocols with a human guest: that was at least the most charitable interpretation of the gesture.

“Thank you, nadi,” Bren murmured, the old woman having been moderately polite, and took his chair opposite the dowager at a table that probably, with other leaves installed, could have served twenty: the room was of that scale, and a host of spare chairs stood about the walls.

Drien was not much slower in arriving. Her formal dress was neither in fashion nor out of it—rich, and dripping with lace, and sparkling with small stones. The dowager almost out-glittered her, in a rich green sparked with small diamonds, but, for the dowager, it was modest, calculatedly so, the paidhi could well guess. His own attire was plain, pale, and moderately fashionable, give or take an unfashionable abundance of lace. It could not have given offense in the East, where fashions always lagged Shejidan by a decade.

There followed the initial service, the offering of drink and the opening course of seasonal items, preserves—those items were usually to avoid, and Bren picked his way through the alkaloid minefield of atevi cuisine without the usual assurance that the cook knew better. It was not polite nor politic to mention his sensitivities. Staff should have taken care of that—if they listened: perhaps they did, since poisonings outside policy and purely by accident were a very embarrassing event in a dinner.

He didn’t bet on it, however. He set himself to be hungry only for items he was relatively sure of and knew that the real danger attended the main course, which there was no dodging.

There was a good deal of small talk: Ilisidi caught up on neighbors’ births and deaths, endured a few small barbs with remarkable patience, and generally remained in fair humor— which meant, Bren thought, that Ilisidi thought there was a very great deal to be gained here.

The main course turned out to be adichara, a fish recognizable in its presentation, the head and dorsal spines set on one side, the tail on the other, in a bed of autumn berries. He was vastly relieved, and took a child’s portion, with no berries.

“The paidhi-aiji hardly eats enough to keep alive,” Drien observed, and Bren bowed his head.

“At my size, nandi, I forever leave too much of my servings. It is by no means a slight to the cook, whose skill is extraordinary. One will remember this dish, indeed.”

“One is hardly sure that is a compliment,” Drien said, looking at Ilisidi. “Do you think his taste can judge anything good?”

“The paidhi’s own table matches any lord’s,” Ilisidi said. “Even mine.”

“One is extravagantly grateful, nandi,” Bren said with a little bow of the head toward Ilisidi.

The small barbs went back and forth, right into dessert, which was another variation on autumn berries—Bren declined, professing himself full, and wondered quietly to the server if there might be co di suri, instead, a white, sweet liqueur he knew was safe.

It appeared, duly served. The one attempt to poison the paidhi-aiji fell aside, whether a test of his aplomb, or his knowledge, or whether it was the mere mischance of an unaccustomed cook. He sipped, and the dowager and their hostess ate, and got down to brandy. Then talk moved to the salon, the room with the fire, which was blazing high this wintry highland evening.

All this time Banichi and Jago had stood by, as Cenedi had, with Nawari, this time stationed outside the salon doors, which a servant shut. The room was the very essence of the East: the beamed ceiling, the ancient hangings on ancient stone, the wooden floor overlain with carpets which had seen at least a hundred years of wear: the sitting-group, of carved wooden chairs with rich cushions.

“He does persistently go with you, ’Sidi-ji,” Drien remarked rudely.

“He certainly does,” Ilisidi said with a tight smile. “And will go where we go.”

“Perhaps he might stay behind when you go. He has a certain interest.”

Bren’s heart did a little jump. The last time Ilisidi had gotten him involved with local lords, he had ended up with a broken arm. It did another jump when Ilisidi answered: “Perhaps. Why would you wish it?”

“Curiosity,” was Drien’s answer. “Mere curiosity.” She sipped her brandy.

“We were speaking of my great-grandson, nadi,” Ilisidi said sharply. They had not been speaking of him since before dinner.

“One has no idea, nadi,” Drien said.

“We did not ride all this distance for dinner and a dance, cousin.

Out with it! You have an opinion. Let us hear it!”

“My opinion. Now when has Malguri asked that?”

“I am asking,” Ilisidi said in a low voice. “I am asking, Dri-aba.”

Drien drew a long, slow breath. “Perhaps there have been exchanges of letters to the south, nand’ ’Sidi.”

Bren’s heart sank. He had hoped they could dismiss that fear. It was the worst news.

“And?” Ilisidi asked.

“Distraction,” Drien said. “Distraction serves the southerner.

That fool Caiti did have the sense to hold apart from him while he ruled. Now, seeing your absence, your preoccupation with affairs in the west, one suspects he has ambitionsc not favoring Murini, no.

But favoring his own agenda.”

“One suspects he has ambitions.” Ilisidi’s tone was contemptuous.

“One has no proof except his actions. He has made a move which he alone cannot sustain. What profit to him, if he must invite more powerful allies? He has offended the Ragi and their association. Of what profit is this to him?”

It made an unwelcome sense. Caiti had made a move that could only draw Ilisidi here, that could only alienate the Western Association, and that could only serve to divide Tabini’s attention and divert it from pursuing Murini.

Only one thing made sense in that context—that the most likely target was Ilisidi herself. Take down Malguri, and Caiti had the heir to Malguri in his lands. If Tabini attempted to intervene, the East might fall away entirely, and Caiti would rule the East, a situation that would make Murini court him for an ally.

Murini had already spent all his credibility with the west, and might not gain power there. That leftc of potential aijiin of the entire aishidi’tat c Caiti.

“It is aimed at you, nand’ dowager,” Bren said out of turn. “By this account, it is aimed particularly at you. With you dead, Caiti has the heir to Malguri. And a great deal of leverage with the south.”

“Well,” Drien said with a little astonishment. “It speaks. And it is not stupid.”

“No,” Ilisidi said, “nand’ Bren is not stupid. Nor are we, aba-ji.

You knew they were about to move. A letter would have been courteous.”

“And dangerous, nand’ ’Sidi. Your power here has grown dim, and we have no man’chi to the West. You have not bothered to visit here. How should we know you remember us?”

A direct statement, and on the surface, rude. But Ilisidi nodded slowly. “You wish us to inspire you.”

“Astonish us, nand’ ’Sidi. Prove you are what you were. Get the boy back. He is with Caiti, and he is, one is certain, in the Haidamar, not the Saibai’tet. I have said what I would say to a guest under my roof. I ask you nothing, until you have the power to promise something.”

Ilisidi gathered her cane before her. “Then we shall not linger to distress your hospitality,” Ilisidi said. “We shall ride back tonight.”

“Folly, cousin! The snow is coming thick out there.”

“We have no time to lose,” Ilisidi said. “And you will help us, Dri-daja, you will communicate to us anything you learn. Cenedi will leave you the technical means, and despite your distaste for western ways, one would advise you take advantage of a resource your neighbors would not expect you to possess. Use our secure communications, Dri-daja.”

“Western nonsense.”

“Like nand’ Bren, you are not stupid, Cousin. You are far from stupid. One would even suspect you are better equipped in this household than rumor has it, though not with a secure line. Every call your household makes is doubtless overheard. Yet these conspirators still fear you. They have not coerced you into their company despite my absence. They made a particular effort to slander you at my table. In very fact, you want Malguri to succeed.

You have every reason to wish that, and you know it.”

Drien’s nostrils flared. “Give us our independence, nandi, signed, sealed, and sworn to. That is my ambition. Freedom from your man’chi.”

“What, we should cede all claim to Ardija?”

“What is better, Cousin? Man’chi held by force or man’chi won by performance? Promises will by no means suffice with me. Malguri must win this challenge, and free us from all claims. This duality of man’chiin has always been unfortunate, in more than numbers.

Now you think we should help you recover this son of the western aiji.”

Ilisidi stared at their hostess a moment, a flat, uncommunicative stare. “Your cousin, Dri-daja.”

“None of mine!”

“We have spent two years aboard the ship educating my great-grandson in finesse and tradition—”

“In a spaceship run by humans! And contacting more foreigners beyond the horizon!”

“In finesse and tradition, I say! That boy can parse the tribes and the rights of the East, yours among them! He knows the heraldry and the machimi—I taught him! He knows the law of rights and the law of succession, the law of land and the law of usage. He knows the worth of bringing these principles into the west, and he is his father’s heir, undisputed, blood of mine, blood of yours, Dri-daja, blood of the Ragi and the North. And any rumors of our disaffection toward the East are utter fiction!”

A small silence followed. Drien folded her hands in her lap, and Drien’s nostrils flared, a deep, long intake of breath. “Ardija. I will have Ardija, and this estate, and I will not bargain for it.”

“You wish justice, Drien-daja,” Bren said, entirely out of turn, and in the next instant not knowing what had possessed him—it was one of those downhill moments, when for a flash of a second he saw the course through the rocks, and in the next blink it would be lost, irrevocable. He spoke out of turn, and saw in slow motion the dowager’s glance and the lady’s astonished stare.

The lady said nothing for a moment. The dowager said nothing.

The silence went on, over the crackling of the fire in the hearth.

Bren cleared his throat—anything to fill that deadly, downward-sliding silence. “Nand’ dowager, one begs to say, there is kinship here. But an unfortunate number exists, an Infelicity of Two. If that were adjustedc” The dowager was no more superstitious than she was gullible. But the language of numbers conveyed the situation. Two. Divided. Never one.

“Independence, Cousin,” the dowager said then, and Bren’s heart quietly resumed its beats.

“At his behest?” the lady cried, indignant. “When we have sued for centuries?”

“No,” the dowager said. “Not at all at his behest. At his reasonable explanation.”

“Explanation! What was never clear? What, fortunate gods, was never clear?”

“He rarely objects. He does so with careful thought. Clearly, we make an Unfortunate Two in this situation. We would need a third to complete us, and one has no notion where to find that third, in the East as it is now.”

“Apparent! But why should I join you?”

“We are survivors of our age, you and I. We are old, old adversaries. And if anything of the gracious old way is to continue, the tradition will not lie in the south. It will lie with us. Ardija is yours, by my grantc while I live.”

“Damn you,” Drien cried.

An actual smile spread on the dowager’s thin lips. “But nevertheless, I stand by my word. You are free. Take your own course. And we shall go on to the Haidamar and free my great-grandson.”

“You need help,” Drien said, “you stubborn fool. By no means should you go! Stay and let my staff make inquires. No good will come of your killing yourself!”

“You will make yourself trouble, Dri-ji.”

“You are the trouble in my life!” Drien reached beside her and picked up a small brass bell, which she rang vigorously. Doors at either end of the room flew open, and the one from the hall, where their own staff waited: Cenedi and Nawari were there; so were Banichi and Jago, on the alert.

“Beds for our guests, nadiin-ji!” Drien ordered, and waved a hand.

“Kasi, ride up to Malguri and advise them our guests are staying.”

“No need for your staff to trouble itself for such a journey, cousin,” Ilisidi murmured. “Proprieties aside—”

“You have your cursed radios,” Drien said in disgust, and in that moment, in that fire-crackling stillness, every ateva clearly heard something. Motion stopped. People listened. Then Bren heard it, in such a deep quiet, remote from all hum of electrics, the faint, faint sound of a laboring engine.

Drien’s face held utter disapproval. “Is that yours, Cousin?”

“Mine?” Ilisidi asked. “Malguri has no such.”

The room and the house waited, hushed, and the sound was clearer, as if the source had passed the cliffs and come onto the road.

“That infernal machine,” Drien muttered.

“The airport?” Ilisidi inquired, logically enough: airports and train terminals were the usual source of transport connections. “Are you expecting anyone to arrive tonight?”

“By no means. That is a bus. That is a miserable bus,” Drien said.

“One knows that motor. That wretched vehicle! What delivery has civilized business arriving at this hour!” She addressed her staff.

“What does it require for our privacy, nadiin? That we shoot the driver?”

“One would hardly counsel that, on this night in particular,”

Ilisidi said with a grim look. “In our present circumstances, one wishes information, of whatever source. And the Malguri bus sits at our doors at present. It may be some visitor from the airport or from Malguri itself.”

“Go,” Drien ordered one of her staff, “and discover what this intrusion wants, nadi.”

It was a cause for anxiety. Bren looked at Ilisidi, and Ilisidi remarked, “Perhaps Banichi might investigate, as well.”

Bren nodded, and Banichi left. Jago did not. There was no way that any bus could negotiate the final part of the road: whoever it had brought would have to walk up to the gates.

“Well, well, well,” Drien said comfortably, “we sit, and we wait. A brandy to pass the time?”

12

Banichi was gone a lengthy period of time. Possibly he reported in the interim to Jago, who had resumed her watch at the door. For his own part, Bren had far rather be in on the Guild’s information flow, but that was not the available choice. He fretted, keeping his ear tuned meanwhile to the conversational tidbits that fell during the wait—Lady Drien discussed her neighbors, discussed the doings of Ilisidi’s staff during her absence. It seemed that Djinana had at some point personally ejected a member of Drien’s staff from the gates of Malguri, in a memorable confrontation over a rowboat that had come unmoored in a stormc the boat had been, one gathered, eventually repatriated to the Cobesthen shore through a neutral party down in Malguri Township.

“Perhaps,” the dowager said, regarding the complaint, “we may, nandi, improve feelings between our staffs. We would never doubt your claim of ownership of such a boat if we were in residence. It would not have happened.”

“Who but the rightful owner would ever know a boat had drifted?” Drien had a gift for pursuing a quarrel far past any useful boundaries. “Are they fools, that they think we would claim some other person’s boat?”

“We do assure you to the contrary, nandi.” Ilisidi’s tone grew just a little icier. “And one will assume my capable staff might have responded differently to your visitation had there been any communication in advance of a party intruding onto Malguri grounds.”

“The common lakeshore!”

“We do not concur! That is Malguri land!”

“The common lakeshore, I say!”

“Nandiin,” Bren said, desperately seeking to head off renewed warfare. “Ought not Banichi to be—”

Back by now, he had meant to say, when there was, indeed, the sound of movement on the snow, that crunching of crusted ice that heralded multiple people arriving on the outside steps.

“Well,” Drien said, still ruffled, but she dispatched servants to the outer hall.

There was some little to-do outside, by the sound of it.

Then came the sound of the outer door opening, a cold draft that sucked at the fire in the grate, attended by a stamping of feet and Banichi’s deep voice overlain by servant voices.

Banichi was giving orders out there, regarding something. It was a peaceful arrival, or there would have been more noise than that, Bren told himself.

And a moment later the lady’s servants returned to the doorway.

“Lady Agilisi has arrived, nandi,” the servant reported.

“Indeed?” Drien looked rightfully surprised. Bren was, himself.

Ilisidi, however, had that formal face on, and no emotion at all escaped, beyond an arched eyebrow—which was to sayc the dowager was on the alert.

“The lady wishes to present her respects to the house, nandi,” the servant said.

“Admit her,” Drien said. And a moment later the door opened its left half to let in a snowy lady in heavy boots and too much cloak, a graying lady who looked quite undone, her hair coming loose in wisps about a cold-stung face. That face showed dismay, distress, all manner of turmoil.

“Nand’ Agilisi.” Drien did not rise. “Come in.”

“Nandiin.” The lady bowed. That was the plural, acknowledging the second presence. And, thin-lipped, she bowed again to the dowager. “Nand’ dowager.”

There were reciprocal nods.

This was that lady from Ilisidi’s dinner party, the lady who had, during the dinner, seemed somewhat in charge. Right now she looked thoroughly done in and windblown.

“We come here,” Agilisi began, and could not get the rest out.

It was not the paidhi’s place to stay grandly seated while an elderly lady struggled for breath. Bren rose to stand behind his chair, at least, in respect to the lady’s age, rank and distress. It was the host’s prerogative to offer her a seat. Not his.

“Will you take a brandy, nandi?” Drien asked. “You do look very out of sorts this evening.”

“Nandi.” Agilisi cast about a heartbeat as if looking for a chair, any chair, and a servant quickly moved one into the circle, a stiff, straight antique. Another servant took the lady’s snow-caked cloak and gloves, and the thin figure that emerged, wearing a rose brocade coat, was far from the ramrod straight carriage of the banquet night. Agilisi reached the chair and sat down, heavily, as if her legs would no longer hold her. A servant brought the brandy service, and another poured, and offered the little glass to the lady, before making the rounds of the rest of them, a de rigeur gesture which all of them declined.

That left the lady with one glass of another house’s brandy, and the necessity to drink it—or not.

“One regrets,” Agilisi managed to say, the brandy as yet undrunk, and with a look at Ilisidi: “one regrets extremely, nand’ dowagerc”

“Where is my great-grandson? What do you know? Out with it, woman!”

“Caiti,” Agilisi said, and took a largish sip of the hazardous brandy, dissolving into a coughing fit. She took a second sip and wiped her lips with a hand gray-edged with cold—or terror.

“Caiti has gone entirely mad. One had no notion, no notion at all what he intended. One hardly knew—”

Thump! went the cane on the carpeted stones. “Where is my great-grandson?”

“In the Haidamar.” Agilisi said. “In the Haidamar Fortress, by all evidence.”

“Were you on that plane, nandi?”

Astute question, Bren thought, and held his breath. In the days before they left the world, there had been one passenger flight daily to and from the East, and unless Agilisi had miraculously hired a plane that had preceded the kidnapping and left the city before the airport shut, she had shared the plane with the kidnappers.

Agilisi was caught with her mouth open. And shut it to a thin line, knowing she was caught, clearly. “Yes, nandi,” she said faintly.

“One did. And left. One hoped you would follow.”

“Nonsense!”

“One hoped, I say!”

“Liar.”

“You deserted us! You went to the west, you went to the heavens, you went on this human’s business, while our own affairs languished! One came to Shejidan in hope—one came to learn whether humans had had all their way, or whether there was still a power in Malguri!”

“And concluded?” Ilisidi asked dangerously.

“One saw too many things, too many changes. One had no idea what to think.”

That, Bren thought, might be the truth. And if ever a woman had better tell the truth, Agilisi was in that position. The lady was in a leaking boat, as the proverb had it. In a leaking boat and paddling hard for shore—any shore, and possibly without assurance that her own house was a safe refuge for her, given her recent moves. Her ties to Caiti had become life-threatening under this roofc granted Drien wasn’t in on it.

Which one did not automatically grant.

“Go on,” Ilisidi said quietly. “What did Caiti say, after leaving his neighbor’s table?”

“One can hardly say—I had no idea, nandi, no idea of the plan. I had no idea of traffic between Caiti and your house—I had no idea of the things afootc”

“No idea at all. And now you come here, tonight, so opportunely.”

“To an ally.”

“An associate, a remote associate, and by no means invited!”

Drien said.

“Your independence in this matter,” Agilisi said. “Your historic independence, Dri-daja—but I had not expected the aiji-dowager to be herec one hoped for your help, Dri-daja, to know whether the aiji-dowager had come homec whether she would come home, or had the power to come home—”

“You doubt it?” Ilisidi asked ominously. “And, leaving Caiti, you came dashing here instead of to me at Tirnamardi, or even more convenient a trip, to my grandson in Shejidan, who was simply up the hill from your hotel!”

“What would one expect there but doubt and arrest? One came here, for one’s dignity, for the dignity of one’s own—”

“Dignity!” Down went the cane again. “Dignity! What of my great-grandson’s dignity, woman?”

“There was nothing one could do—I had come to Shejidan with half my staff. They said—limitations on the plane. Which in no wise proved true, nandi. The lie had started before we ever left the ground for the west. I was slighted. My house was slighted! One does not take that lightly!”

“You were at best a damned key, nandi, a piece of social stage dressing, all my lakeside neighbors save one, and their people are in your house, do you deny it?”

Agilisi’s mouth opened and shut. And opened again. “There are ties,” she confessed. “There are ties of marriage. As there are ties to your own household, nandi!”

A bit of cheek, that. A muscle jumped in Ilisidi’s jaw. “A tie that will not long survive,” Ilisidi said.

“Nor in mine, nandi. Caiti—Caiti has to be stopped.”

“Does he, now? And what sent you flying here, Agilisi-daja? What sudden burst of understanding informed you it was time to run here? —Or were you sent, woman?”

“Not sent. Not sent here. The convoy formed—by the plane—and we dropped behind—my guard and I. Saein stayed, my seniormost, he moved to lead them off. Toward Cie. They know—Caiti knows—”

The brandy glass went over, dislodged by a motion of Agilisi’s hand, and she failed to catch it. It landed, intact, on the carpet, but no servant moved.

“What does Caiti know? And what does he intend with my great-grandson?”

“Caiti, nandi, Caiti has contacted the usurper. Murini.”

Bren’s heart skipped a beat. Likely several hearts present did.

But Ilisidi only resettled her fingers on the head of her cane and stared straight at Agilisi. “Remarkable.”

“One had no idea,” Agilisi cried. “One had no idea there was any such aim in this venture. He plans—he plans to have the heir of Malguri in his hands, and to fling the usurper into war with the west, to keep your grandson occupied in his own lands. And if you join them, nandi, they say they will deal, and if not, they will still have the west at war and the heir of Malguri in their hands.”

There was a heavy, heavy silence. “Is that his message?”

“No! No, nandi, that is not his message, that is his plan. He knew you were likely following. He wants you dead. He wants the heir in his hands. He wants Malguri. And we will not back him in this: there is no aiji over the East, and if there is ever one it will not be Lord Caiti! He has lied to us, he has misled, he has drawn us into a plot without consultation, and brought in the south without any authority—we do not consent to this, we do not bow the neck to this damned bully!”

“A pretty, pretty speech, nandi. And where is Murini?”

“Coming here, if Caiti told the truth—coming to ascertain Caiti does have your great-grandson.”

Ilisidi rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and down again, a gesture of exasperation.

“The truth, nandi, the truth this time!”

“Caiti is a fool!” Agilisi cried.

“So he will invite Murini under his roof, and demonstrate he has my great-grandson. And Murini, in awe of this astonishing fact, will obligingly leave my great-grandson in his hands while he goes off to become a target for my grandson’s forces. What do you think we are, Agi-daja? Equal fools?”

“Nandi, so he told Lord Rodi and me! And Lord Rodi went with him to the Haidamar, but I slipped back and my guard got me away—to come here, to consult with Lady Drien, to find some middle ground—some means to unite the independent neighbors in protest of this lunacy— Clearly, neither I nor my people were respected, to be brought there ignorant of all plans, to be confronted with this—we are innocent. I and my people are innocent!”

“A fine story. And all this plan was to get through our door in Shejidan, to make face-to-face contact with a traitor on our staff, carry out this monstrous idiocy, and we, of course, were to come rushing obligingly into ambush in the Haidamar.”

Across the lake, Bren thought: the image leaped up of a force from Malguri coming in by water, instead of overland, all exposed, and vulnerable. The dowager would not have done it.

Murini would have known that. Murini had some sense of tactics.

But did Caiti, whose people had faced Malguri across the haunted lake and quarreled about its isle for generations— did he think the dowager would be where she was at present, not at Malguri plotting to sail across, but overland, and past the jut of the south end cliffs to make peace with a splinter of Malguri itself?

Without that peace, Malguri might have found difficulty to cross that land quietly. There might have been alarms.

Certainly it was noisy enough to have drawn Agilisi in, claiming she had come to appeal to Drien.

And Drien, fresh from her acquisition of the disputed land, had said not one word to back her. That had to worry the woman.

“How can I prove my favorable disposition?” Agilisi asked—in truth, in a desperate situation. “How can I make Malguri understand that my district has nothing to gain here?”

“How indeed?” Ilisidi said darkly. “Except you tell the truth, every particular of this truth. When? How? Why? And with what force does this southerner invade the East at Caiti’s invitation?”

“Caiti plans to double-cross him, one believes.” Agilisi’s lips formed the syllables carefully, distinctly. “Nandi, we are betrayed, we are all equally betrayed.”

“Oh, one doubts equally, Agi-daja. One very much doubts equality in this treason. So you dared not go home. Who are his people in your household? Name them.”

“My nephew,” Agilisi said faintly. “But one pleads for him. He is young. He is associated with a Saibai’tet girl, a young fool. The one—the one to fear is his mother, Saibai’tet and resident with my brother. That onec that one I freely give to you.”

“Your brother? Or the Saibai’tet woman?”

“The woman, nandi. My brother’s wife. My brother is in a sad state of health, incapable of knowing what she signs, what she appoints, what staff she brings in to attend him.”

“Is this an accident, this indisposition? And do we attribute it to the wife—or his sister?”

Agilisi’s mouth hung slightly agape. She was not, Bren thought, a very clever woman—or her fabrications were not.

“One would justly have been suspicious,” Ilisidi said. Bang! went the cane. Cenedi moved up beside her chair. “I think this lady should have been far more suspicious. One needs more fingers than the gods gave us to count the betrayals. She fears to go to her domain. Clearly, she is in want of protection— granted we find out the truth in the next quarter hour.”

“Nandi!” Agilisi cried, looking from left to right. “Dri-daja!”

“This boy whose welfare is at issue is my youngest cousin,” Drien said coldly, “and has been shamefully treated by associates with whom you have willingly sat at table and connived, nandi. And now you bring your difficulties under my roof? We are offended.”

“The lady’s guard is resting below,” Cenedi said quietly, “nandi.”

Stripped of protection, her guard incapacitated, and the dowager as coldly angry as one was ever likely to detect—the unfortunate lady darted glances from one face to another, quick, reckoning, fearful glances.

“The truth, woman!” Ilisidi snapped. “Your ailing brother, indeed! You are the lord of Catien! You have permitted or not permitted this infestation of Saibai’tet servants and this woman under your roof, am I mistaken? Talk!”

“We were threatened!” Agilisi protested. “Malguri has done nothing for our region since you left! Who was there, nandi? Who was there on whom we could rely to sustain our independence? The aiji in Shejidan was lost—there was only the Kadagidi and the Taisigin! There was only them! I never chose to accept a Saibai’tet wife under my roof—but I had no power to resist, I had no great store of weaponsc”

“And Caiti did?”

“Caiti had the backing of the Kadagidi!”

“Ah,” Ilisidi said, and indeed, in that, a certain number of things made sense. “The backing of the Kadagidi. And was this maneuver Caiti’s idea—or Murini’s?”

“Caiti—” The woman seemed short of breath, as if there was not enough air in the room to get out what she had to say. “One suspects Caiti intends to double-cross Murini. Clearly— clearly—Murini is fallen and falling fast. He will surely go down.

But with his help—” She ran utterly out of breath, and drew in another. “Caiti means to take the East out of the aishidi’tat, build an Association here, holding the child—the child hostage against his father. He intends you should come there. He knows you will never negotiate, nandi.”

The plane that took off simultaneously for the South, the lord with the convenient excuse, a diversion, Bren thought, ticking off one southern lord who needed dealing with.

But they had plenty on their hands where they were.

“We shall not negotiate,” Ilisidi said quietly. “Nand’ Bren.”

“Nandi? We shall go wherever we need go.”

“One has no doubt,” Ilisidi said.

“Can either of these ladies open those gates?” he ventured to ask.

Agilisi glanced at him, clearly taken aback. Drien looked disapprovingly down her nose at his impertinence. Ilisidi, however, had raised that dangerous brow.

“Answer the Lord of the Heavens,” Ilisidi said, leaning chin on fist. “You can find your way back into Caiti’s good graces, can you not, lady of Catien? One is certain you can at least get the gates open—if only for their desire to know what sudden turn of events brings you back.”

“One might venture it,” the lady said. Gone, all her prim assurance. It was a straw, and with whatever motivation, she grasped at it. “One might, with your favor, nand’ dowager.”

“We shall hold my favor in abeyance, woman. You have walked into it and you know your life is sinking low, low indeed, in my present plans. Redeem it. And rest assured this is your one chance.”

“Agilisi is my associate, cousin,” Drien said, “and courted by lords Caiti and Rodi, as was I, as all the lords of the lakeshore and eastward. Her house was, indeed, infiltrated.”

“Is yours?” Ilisidi asked bluntly.

“My people have been with me all my life, Cousin. As yours.”

That, Bren thought, might be a frank and honest answer. A small silence persisted in the room, and Agilisi’s life quite literally hung on that silence.

“Our man’chi,” Agilisi said. “Rescue my house, nandi. We need your help. We appeal for your help. We quit this madness when we knew its intentionsc”

“Do you know the premises of the Haidamar?”

“Somewhat.” A tremor possessed the lady, who was not, herself, young. It might be a chill. Her boots showed water-stain, the snow having melted. But again, one doubted that tremor was in any sense chilled feet. “I have been there. I was a guest there, before this venture. Nandi, I had no knowledgec I appeal for protection of my house, my associates, nandi. I am putting them all at risk in turning to you. These are innocent people, my staff, my guardc”

Ilisidi lifted her hand, stopping the torrent short. “Their safety now depends on our success and my great-grandson’s life. Provide my staff a diagram.”

Getting through that gate. Getting the gate open, Bren thought.

That was all they needed—the bus that had brought Agilisi to Cobesthen might be able to break through, but finesse— finesse was going to get the boy out alive.

Agilisi looked about to wilt altogether, trembling visibly as she lifted a hand in protest. “One hardly knows,” Agilisi began, and then Drien: “We know those premises,” Drien said, the infelicitous dual augmented with the mitigating article. “And they will admit me, cousin, with my neighbor. Let me intercede for my neighbor. She may stay here. We shall ride to the north shore.”

It was gallant of the lady. It was downright grand, considering the peril of her association and the dowager’s outraged anger. There was still the remote chance Lady Drien was in with the kidnappers from the beginning—she had certainly been named; there was the remote chance Lady Drien had sought the promise of title to Ardija from Caiti, which could mean she was trying to lead them all into Caiti’s trap— But if a dozen years of reading atevi faces and manners was any guide, she had every appearance of telling the truth, and every reason for peace. Ilisidi as a neighbor was assuredly more stable than Caiti’s hare-brained effort to rip the East out of the aishidi’tat.

If they survived it.

“I would go,” Agilisi protested in a faint voice.

“Yes,” Ilisidi said, “but you shall not. Rely on my cousin for your survival. Become indebted to her. And expect your brother to lose a wife!” To Drien she said: “Cousin. You will find we remember debts.”

So they sat, with the same fire crackling away and all the players the same but one, and the whole East changed. We’ve landed in a damned machimi, Bren thought, not letting a wisp of expression to his face. He could even put a name to it: Kosaigien Ashai, as ancient and tangled a nest of pieces as existed in the dramatic repertoire. He had studied it, and never made thorough sense of the moves and the motives.

But there it was, the grand gesture, the acceptance, the realignment which had challenged human students for decades—a revised set of man’chiinc the principal’s own, and everybody else’s.

And blood to follow. A lot of it.

Neither Agilisi nor Drien had Guild help, as such—and the thought came through clear as a lightning strike: Cenedi and his men, Eastern themselves, would be recognized in a heart-beat.

Banichi and Jago might not bec but Jago had been at the dinner party.

Banichi, however, had not been: Banichi had not yet returned from the Guild that night. He meant to mention that fact to the dowager, at the next opportune moment. And he wasn’t sending Banichi and Jago off into a desperate situation without him, no way in hell.

“Where,” Ilisidi inquired further, “Agi-daja, where is the bus that brought you?”

“At the base of the hill, nand’ dowager. The very last of the road.

There is no driver. Your man took us at gunpoint—”

“We shall need that bus. Nand’ Drien, you may go with us.”

“In that infernal machine! Overland is the sensible way, overland or at very least by boatc”

“Come, come, Dri-daja, straight into ambush? You need new experiences. You are not too old. We need you.”

“Then overland!”

“We cannot dither about riding there, not with my great-grandson—your cousin thrice removed!—at issue! The bus may need to go further, but it goes faster, and does not wear us down.”

“I am far too old for that rattletap!”

“If I fare well in a bus,” Ilisidi said, “you may survive it. And your staff, Dri-daja, can bring the mecheiti overland. You shall ride with us and arrive ahead of them, I wager you on it.”

“One has never agreed to this machine!” Drien cried.

“One has not written down the disposition of Ardija, either,”

Ilisidi said primly, and called for pen and paper.

Three quarters of an hour later Ilisidi had signed and sealed a note ceding Ardija, the lady Agilisi and her sole retainer were confined to a comfortable though chilly room in Cobesthen Fortress, and the rest of them were on mecheita-back, with the entire local herd and the Malguri herd together, all riding down toward the intersection and the waiting Cadienein-ori airport bus.

It was a whole damned cavalry, Bren thought, and the two herd bulls were not in the least compatible, Drien’s and Ilisidi’s. They raised a bawling complaint all the way down the road, prime reason to take the bus and not have that all the way around the lake shore, announcing their presence.

And having hastily having thrown on his warmer coat and trousers and having left all but his most essential baggage under Drien’s roof, Bren tried to keep that shorter coat spread out over Nokhada’s warm, winter-coated body, holding as much of her heat near his body as he could. The bus itself was not going to be comfortable, he was damned sure.

It sat, dark and dead, right amid the one-lane road, with snow piling on its hood and top—a stubby half-bus transport. A delivery van might have been more commodious. It said, on the side, in large letters: Cadienein-ori Regional Transport Authority.

It offered no sign of life as Cenedi’s men investigated it end to end and underneath. Two bundles went out, unceremoniously, likely Lady Agilisi’s luggage, right into a snowbank. One of Cenedi’s men started the engine, and reported a half a tank of fuel.

“Enough to get down to the depot,” Cenedi said, getting down.

Nawari slid down and held Babsidi’s rein, urging him to kneel.

Ilisidi got down, and Drien followed, helped by her own people, while the squalling between Babsidi and the other herd leader went on and men strained to keep snaking necks out of play.

Bren secured the rein, slid down to the snowy ground and got out of Nokhada’s way in a fast move to the side of the bus.

Cenedi himself elected to drive; and all of them, Banichi, Jago, Nawari, and all the rest of the dowager’s men took to the bus in haste, except the one of the dowager’s men assigned to handle Babsidi, and go with Drien’s men and the herds overland to rendezvous with them at the Haidamar.

There was no loitering, either, with mecheiti involved. “Go!”

Nawari told the men with the herds, and Drien’s men headed off into the dark, down the road ahead and off it, in short order.

Ilisidi had meanwhile appropriated the front seat, Drien was, one could see through the small back window of the cab, compelled to the second row, and Bren jammed himself up close in the fifth with Banichi and Jago: cold, poorly padded seat, cold metal floorboards underfoot, and a draft from the ill-framed windows, but that was minimal discomfort, all things weighed against a long cross-country ride. A lone, relatively thin human was very grateful to be surrounded by atevi that gave off heat like a furnace.

Weapons were everywhere. The bodies around him were armored, another good thing, in the paidhi’s estimation. The engine growled, and the bus got into motion, backwards. Bren stayed very still, with his hand on the gun in his coat pocket, as a last two shadows climbed up onto the bus bed, both the dowager’s men, dim silhouettes bristling with armaments, and made their way down the aisle to the rear of the bus.

The bus kept backing. Would back, until they reached a turnaround, and Bren could not readily remember how far back that wide spot was.

So they were off, and Agilisi waited the outcome. The lady had arrived expecting to politick with Drien and now had an unenviable refuge in Drien’s upstairs, doomed to wait, and hope it was not the other side that showed up. Her man, not Guild, and vastly outnumbered and outgunned, had no part in the dowager’s party, or in Drien’s, but one had to remember that unfortunate man had a partner somewhere, and that partnership would not be split, not by anything less than death or highest duty. Consequently, the household staff, such as remained, was under Drien’s orders to admit no one of that man’chi.

“Is there,” he asked Banichi and Jago finally, while the bus was still, in reverse, navigating the track downhill, “any remote chance she knew the dowager was here?”

“No one at Malguri would have given out that information.”

“Drien’s staff does have a telephone.”

“Tapped, Bren-ji,” Jago said with what seemed a certain personal satisfaction, “and no message went out or in.”

The virtues of having a lot of Guild security staff about one’s person. Efficiency. They lacked Tano and Algini, who ordinarily managed electronics and explosives, but things got done.

And that—besides Drien’s sudden self-interest in seeing the dowager win—gave one a certain notion the lady with them had told the truthc the ink might be hardly dry on that pact, but it gave Drien a powerful motive; and Agilisi could only hope they got back in one piece and that it was the dowager’s previously negotatied mercy she had to trust. Drien’s household was there to swear to what she had said and done.

But it was a good situation. Not an enviable place to be.

And damn, could the woman not have come with a full fuel tank?

The bus reached the wide spot, executed a precarious turnaround, then picked up speed.

They had to go clear back down to the airport road. But they did as they could. It was what they had. And they moved as fast as a vehicle of this vintage could managec en route back to the valley, to clearer, less winding roads, and, ultimately, a fuel station. The lake sat in an old crater—Malguri on the highest side, with its impregnable cliffs; Cobesthen to the south and the Haidamar to the north of it; and they were headed down, if not on the flat, at least on flatter ground, between Caiti’s two holdings of the Haidamar and the Saibai’tet Ami, and very much within his domain for most of their trek, verging on Catien for a small part of it.

And if Caiti made a run for it—could they possibly get intelligence of such a move, which might be designed to carry the heir to some other prison? Could they get between him and the Saibai’tet? That depended on where the roads lay, and he didn’t know that answer.

But Murini, Agilisi had said, was coming to the Haidamar, likely from the airport at Cie, judging that Malguri Airport would not be a good landing spot. Murini meant to take the heir in hand and would gladly take on the aiji-dowager and any force she could bring to bear, presumably while Caiti sat and watched, basking in this new and favorable alliance.

Ilisidi was moving as fast as she possibly could to get ahead of this train of events. She had not threatened war. She had not called in the Guild, unwelcome in the East. She went directly after her great-grandson, and went after him in the dead of night, in a snowstorm, and maybe that was the best choice, and maybe it was not.

Get through the gates, and hope to God they were the first to do so.

Once Murini got his hands on Cajeiri, there was no question of Murini leaving the boy in Caiti’s hands, no hope of that, as he figured it, not unless Caiti was a damned sight cleverer than any of them thought he was. And what Caiti had tried, never mind he had succeeded this far, did not encourage them to believe that he was all that clever.

Bren found dinner sitting very uncomfortably as the bus lurched and tilted on the narrow road, rocketing downhill, all but out of control on an unfamiliar road. Everyone swayed. A few had heads down, against hands braced on the seats. If he were at all sensible, Bren told himself, he would try his damnedest to sleep while they traveled. It was going to be a long night, a long way around. The Guild with them knew it. The Guild took its rest where it could.

But he doubted he was going to be able to.

He heard certain of Ilisidi’s young men debating the wisdom of trying to get through to Malguri, whether their satellite phones were help or liability in this situation—he heard frank discussion of other Guild being sent in, if Tabini-aiji got the straight word on what was happening, and about the likelihood of Eastern disaffection, and the plain fact they were just that far from help.

This, as the bus hit the lowland road. It assumed a roaring fast pace for about an hour, and then slowed and pulled in—the fuel depot, Bren thought, where the road passed through a finger of Lady Agilisi’s district of Catien—or he was thinking that, when Banichi and Jago flattened him to the seat.

The rest of the men scrambled out. Bren stayed down as Banichi and Jago followed. It was very quiet outside, and then came the distinctive sound of the fuel cap going off the bus and the hose going in.

There was such a thing as trust, that of his bodyguard toward him, a contract of obligations. He obediently stayed flat the while the refueling went on, not satisfying his curiosity, not even lifting his head from the seat. Banichi and Jago didn’t need his help on this mundane task, not in the least.

He heard voices, quiet ones, against the side of the bus. One mentioned something about the attendant being in the cellar.

That was informative.

The cap went back on. Everyone boarded again, Banichi and Jago among the first in, and wanted their seats, which he supposed gave him leave to sit up.

Jago set a hand on his shoulder as she eased in.

“Cenedi has called Malguri on the depot phone, Bren-ji. They are aware. They will get word to the aiji.”

“Good,” he said. Well that Tabini at least be warned what was happening. He had the most amazing disposition to shiver. “Are we all right?”

“A plane has landed in the north,” Banichi said. “At Cie.”

“From?” he asked.

“No one is sure of its origin,” Jago said. “It may be scheduled freight. It may not. It is worrisome. Planes are entering Eastern airspace again. Malguri Airport itself is back in operation. Guild may have come in. We did not inquire.”

They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t raise the question for fear of blowing cover. Malguri had seen fit to tell them that was going on, but there was no telling what else was.

Which meant they could be neck-deep in a shooting war by morning. It didn’t help the chills, as the bus started up and began to accelerate away from the fueling station.

“Did we kill anyone back there?” he asked. He didn’t know why he asked. He didn’t want to know, except that he wanted some sense of how far the dowager was holding off the people of Catien, whose lady was locked in Drien’s upstairs. He hoped there was still a modicum of civilization in this district, that there was still some sense of restraint governing the lords “No,” Jago said. “They were very wise, and respected the sight of the lady of Catien’s ring.”

So they had that—by force or by gift: Agilisi’s seal on their use of her goods.

“They are locked in the storeroom,” Banichi added, as the bus reached its traveling gear, “where there is no telephone, nor radio.

They believe someone will come along before noon tomorrow.”

13

Chip and chip and chip. The outer halls were quiet now. The light was off out there. The light had gone off in here, too. One had no flashlight: that had gone, with the other cell. One could no longer see what one was doing. And Cajeiri’s fingers hurt. Probably they were bleeding, but one could ignore that when one was mad. And Cajeiri was mad by now. He was damned mad, and tired, and grew madder the more it hurt.

He was, however, well through the plaster coating. He had come up against a bare spot of what felt like thin boards, which he could just get the thin, flat end of the bucket handle into. He pulled.

Repeatedly. He said bad words to himself, in ship-speak.

One thin board broke with a snap like thunder, and took plaster with it.

That was good. He got much of his hand in. He pulled another board. He began to grin, partly from the effort and partly from the success. He wriggled around and applied both hands, which broke more boards and brought more plaster onto the floor where the bed ordinarily rested. Beyond that was a gap. And rubble. He ripped out pieces, rocks, some fist sized. None of them were mortared in, or if they were, it was entirely haphazard.

He began to get the picture of a neat plaster facade and some sort of rubble fill between. Cheaply done, mani would say, and sniff at it. A quickly done wall in a building this old. Maybe dividing something off, on the cheap. That was interesting. It was not at all how they built on the ship. He could do something with this.

He started scraping the opposing wood with the use-sharpened flat end of the bucket handle, scrape, scrape, scrape. His knuckles bled. That was no consequence. Temper kept him warm on the cold floor. Temper kept him going when they might expect him to be asleep.

He wished he had Gene’s help. Artur’s. He imagined that they worked beside him, Fortunate Three, and that made matters better. He ought properly, he knew, to think of his Taibeni associates. He belonged to them. He feared they might even be dead because of those people who had carried him away from his bed, a thought which roused a keen and proper pain in his heart; but when he really, seriously wanted help, he naturally thought of Gene, who was always ready for a scheme, who thought of things, really clever things, instead of looking at him for help.

Gene and Artur had no idea where he was now. They could never imagine the trouble he was in at the moment. If they did know, they would be trying everything to get to him—if they were not separated by space and authority and adults. And that, when he got out of here and if he got to grow up, that was going to get fixed.

They were his first associates, the first beings in all the world—or above it—who had ever come to him, as persons of his own age and rank— Well, at least they were all of them passengers, and so they were equals in that way; and they were still his, in a special way.

Gene and Artur. Their coconspirators, Bjorn and Irene, he let into their company for felicity’s sake and to please mani-ma, so they were at least a Completion of Five, which was very solid and respectable, like a social group. But increasingly he kept forgetting Bjorn, and now in desperate case he began thinking just of Gene and Artur and Irene, his Felicity of Threec Because he was gone from them. He was gone from them and unless he could get back or get them down here, they would go their own way and be human, and he would be atevi— Damn it.

Granted he lived through this.

Scrape and scrape and scrape. The spoon kept bending, but the bucket handle held out. It was slick with sweat or blood, he had no idea which, in the dark. It made a gritty paste with the mortar scrapings and the dust, and one end had sharpened. It made it a better tool.

Damn them. Damn them, Bren-nandi would say. He was by no means sure what that meant, but Bren was careful about saying it, so he figured it was potent.

He did hope he still had Antaro and Jegari, if they were alive.

And he knew beyond any doubt in his very core they would want to find him—if they were still alive. He really, desperately hoped they were. And in between imagining Gene and Artur, he imagined Jegari and Antaro going to his father, and telling his father what had happened.

Oh, then all hell would have broken loose, and they would call his great-grandmother, was what, and they would tell nand’ Bren. The whole world would be looking for him by nowc Granted his father and mother were still alive. Granted the Bu-javid was not back in the hands of Murini and his associates, which was the thought that scared him most and made him stay awake and keep digging.

He scraped a knuckle, gritted his teeth, and scraped away, which necessarily hit the knuckle over and over and over.

He wanted them all to be alive, and looking for him. He wanted his father and mother to be alive. He wanted mani to come and get him. He had complained about their discipline, and never thought he would miss it, but now he wanted them, he wanted their rules and their law around him. He had never been alone in his life, not alone like this, and if he stopped fighting long enough, he could be scared, which mani’s great-grandson never could be. So he kept at it.

Scrape and scrape.

Damn!

Something resisted. He got fingers into it, and found something like— Wire. Two or three strands of it. He pulled, popping it past boards and plaster, and pulled, bracing his feet.

It might be part of the construction, some sort of reconstruction.

But the more he pulled it, he began to think it was really wire, metal-centered wire, electrical wire. Somebody had made a very inelegant repair when they plastered up the wall, was what.

He was by no means sure he could get the mess loose, but he wanted it. He wanted it out of his hole, for one thing; for another— For another, an idea was coming to him, even if the light switch was on the other side of the door.

There was a light socket in the ceiling.

He braced both feet and hauled, and hauled as the wire resisted.

One end came out, and he tested it gingerly with the bucket handle.

No spark. Dead. Entirely dead.

But it was metal-centered. It was old and dusty and twisted, but he had a lot of it and it was metal. And if he could cut it off or bend and break it and get it into his handsc He tried breaking it. Hauling on it. Got out from under the bed and hauled on it until it cut his fingers.

Plaster popped. He felt along it. More wire had come out of the wall. He had no way to see what he was doing, but he hauled hard, feet braced, the wire wrapped around his hands, and suddenly, as if it had been twisted around something, it just came loose and came out, pitching him backward.

He had his prize. A lot of it. But it was only a prize if it had no breaks in it. And he picked one wire and ran it through his fingers, sitting there in the total dark.

Intact, until one got to the bristly, prickly end. He tested the other pieces. And he began to put them all together, until he had one really long piece of somebody’s very sloppy work on an old wall.

All useless, however, unless he could get up to that light socket in the ceiling.

He got up. He found the chair in the dark and moved it over. The light, in the picture his memory gave him, had been a little off from dead center of the room, a little more toward the door. He put the chair there.

And he climbed atop it. The ceiling was out of reach. He was just that much too short to reach anything but the tip of the bulb.

Damn again.

He thought of things he had. And climbed down and hauled the mattress off the bed, wondering if he could do anything with the bed frame—close call, then. He nearly upset the metal water pitcher. He saved it, in the dark, down on one knee.

Then he had a thought, dragged the mattress over to the chair, and laid it midway over the chair bottom, and climbed back atop it all. It made queasy footing, but the thickness of the mattress gave him another little bit, if he balanced very carefully.

He could reach the ceiling. He unscrewed the darkened bulb, got down and got the conjoined wire and his bucket handle and climbed up again, with the wire wrapped around his arm to hang onto it.

This was the anxious part. He felt the inside of the socket, identified the contact as best he could guess, then used the bucket handle to try to pull the whole socket apart and get at the wires that connected to the socket.

That proved harder than he thought. He peeled a corner of the socket, peeled more of it, but there were screws involved, and he could not get at the wires themselves. Instead, he folded metal over, punched it onto the contact, cutting his sore fingers, and rammed it down hard. Then he stripped the covering off his insulated wire, got down to paper lining, and stripped and spat, balanced precariously there the while, and hoping no one came.

Somewhere far off he could hear doors opening. He could hear the sound of a vehicle, a bus or a truck, somewhere outside. People were coming and going and that was not good, if somebody was leaving and might mean to take him with them, or maybe if they had gotten a doctor—that would not be good at all.

He spat paper, took the stripped part of the wire and just wrapped it into the wreckage he had made of the socket, finding no other way to secure it, and, worst of all, having no way at all to test his construction to see if it even worked. He got down, shivering from long effort, and from the cold, and carefully, gingerly, took his dangling wire past the chair back and over to the door.

Big metal door latch there, a lot of metal. He stripped more wire, starting it with his teeth, and stripped it way up and wrapped bare wire around the door latch.

So the light switch was on the outside of the door. If somebody flipped it on and then put his hand on the latch— Then he thought of something else he knew about electricity. He found his water pitcher by the bed and he brought it to the door and made a puddle just right where someone had to step.

That was the first part of his plan. But he did not, as Bren would say, put all his eggs in that basket. Or try to eat dinner before he caught it, in mani-ma’s proverb. He got back onto his bruised knees, started to move the bedframe to cover his escape hole, and, on inspiration, and seeing how it rattled without the weight of the mattress on it, decided to see if the bedframe and the wire underpinnings came apart.

The frame readily unsocketed, no question. He took the thin, linked-wire frame that constituted the mattress springs over to the door and laid that metal framework down right over his puddle in front of the door.

But he had derived something better from the disassembly of the bed frame. He had the metal side rail, a pole longer than he was, with a flat end where it had hooked onto the other end. And when he applied that to the hole he had made in the wall he had started, he was able to lever out pieces of wood and chunks of plaster one after another.

Now if somebody tried to walk in on him and turned on that light, they would be busy with that watered metal gridwork.

There was a lot of racket outside. A lot of coming and going. He heard doors slam. He kept digging, hammering the interior of his hole in the plaster until the rail went all the way through the wall.

Free for an instant. Then it hit something on the other side.

Thump.

Dammit!

14

Big bump. The bus bounced, swung, skidded. And clawed its way onto an uphill climb.

They’d made the time they could on the lower road. They were headed up again. Everyone in the bus had waked including Banichi and Jago, and now heads sank again, experienced security getting rest where they could.

Bren lowered his head back to Jago’s shoulder. She hugged him a little closer, maybe seeking relief from his weight, maybe just for the warmth. As resting places went, he couldn’t complain of it.

And he tried his best not to think. Thinking did absolutely nothing for sleep. He just listened to the tires on the snow, tried to make himself believe they were just going up to Malguri, peaceful vacationc breakfast in the morningc Damned lie. But he kept telling it to himself. Reason wasn’t working outstandingly well. He was so tired he was glitching in and out despite everything else.

Eyes shut. Another dark space, and a turn. Another dark space, and another turn, consistently upward, and at an uncomfortable grade, the winter tires grabbing for purchase.

God, don’t let us get stuck in a snowbank.

Lurch. Then the bus accelerated, on the level.

The lakeshore, he thought, which jarred him right back to the immediate moment, a desperate race, the bus now fueled for a long haul, for the north rim and the north shore.

Possibilites started crowding in. Contingencies. Resources.

Calamities.

He gnawed his lip and started calculating. Again. And knew nobody up front was going to ask him anyway.

Through the wall. But blocked by something.

Cajeiri braced his toe against an irregularity of the slate floor behind him, shoved the long pole through the hole with all his strength and felt whatever-it-was scoot a little.

Furniture, maybe.

Then he thought if there was somebody next door it was certainly going to be suspicious-looking when plaster started cracking and the wall started going. He got down flat and curled around to get his eye up to the hole.

There was no glimmer, which only meant it was pitch-black if there was a crack in the other side at all, and there was no way to tell whether he was getting anywhere.

The hell with it. If he heard them coming, they would run into the boobytrap first.

So he swiveled about again and started thumping away at the plaster. He bent double, lying sideways, braced his feet and got hold of the thin boards that backed the plaster, where the wires had been.

It definitely gave. Cracked, with another heave.

He had a wide enough escape hole on his side of the wall. He lay as he was and simply kicked. Hard.

Two and three more kicks, and his toe went partway through the other side, trapping it in thin boards. It took work to haul it out. He got the bed rail in, took aim, and rammed it.

Crack.

That was encouraging. He swiveled about again and looked. Then he turned about again and went on kicking it until his whole foot could get all the way through.

Then he started kicking just above it, and broke the plaster and boards in on his side, and out, on the other side. By now his foot hurt and his knee hurt and his arms were tired from holding himself still, but he was finally getting somewhere. He kept after it, kicking it and ramming it with the bed rail, and eventually he could get his whole leg through if it wanted to. It just needed a lot more kicking in.

He rolled over and changed feet, and battered away above, and when that leg got tired, he sat down by his hole and pulled at the boards behind the plaster, and took out rubble fill, and shoved that aside. He pulled and pushed again for all he was worth, until he was sure his hands were bleeding, and he had splinters in every one of his fingers.

But it was bigger. It was nearly big enough. There were ways to get through really narrow grates and conduits—he had learned that on the ship. You got one shoulder up, and made your ribs small, and you just lifted this side of your ribs and then the other side the same, and you could do that every time you breathed, just a finger’s width, maybe, but he might make it through. His shoulders were the widest part of him. If he practiced the ribs-lifting, he thought he could get there, if he just took off his coat and his shirt.

He took off his jacket, and took off his shirt and put that through, to be sure it didn’t snag on the edges. Then he started after it, right shoulder, whole arm, folding inward, ribs, and all, in time with little, helpful breaths. It was like smothering. It scraped his ribs—bloody, he was sure. And it was dangerous to stop, because one lost the rhythm if one stopped, and if one lost the rhythm, muscles could freeze up and then one would be stuck for sure and maybe not able to breathe if one’s associates failed to pull him out by the feet—which had happened to him once, in the conduits on the ship.

And then they would find out, and if somebody got shocked getting in the door he would be in far worse confinement, not to mention— His right hand came up against something, a barrier, whatever thing had stopped the rail from going through, and it was too close.

He shoved against it with all his strength, and it scooted, and felt like a cardboard box.

He kept moving, all the same, breathe and wriggle and lift and move. He kept the movement going, and shoved with his toes on the other side, which, besides his scraped ribs, was a very useful leverage.

His head had emerged into a place as black as the one he was leaving. His arms were both through, now, and he shoved, and butted his head against the stupid cardboard box, and with repeated efforts, he got one elbow down onto the dusty floor and began to drag the rest of him through, alternately shoving at the obstructing box and heaving forward.

Now his bare stomach scraped over debris. Ragged edges of board and plaster and rubble had scored his shoulders and ribs, and the air was icy cold. But his front half was through, into a whole other and unguarded room. The rest of him came fast, feet and all, a last scrape over the rubble, and he could stand up.

If there was a door, it was likely to be to his right, the same orientation as the room he had come from. He gathered up his shirt and coat in a wad, then felt his way through chaotic stacks of boxes, bumped into a shelf and, after that shelf, found the door.

Not locked. He moved the latch downward, his heart beating hard.

He stopped, then, put his shirt and coat on for warmth, even tucked the shirt tail in—for luck, everything the way mani insisted.

Coat on. Proper young gentleman. Time to go and leave this place.

He pushed down the latch just to test it, so, so relieved that it moved. He ached. All his scrapes stung, and all his bruises hurt.

And he really, really hoped there was no guard out in the hall. He could hear some to-do somewhere in the building; but that was all the more reason just to be out of here. Fast.

The latch moved down, and bumped just slightly, moving the latch mechanism, and the door came open a crack, letting in a dim light. At that point, looking back, he saw he was leaving a room full of unspecified stuff, that was Gene’s word for it: stuff. Cans on the shelf. Food. Drums of flour and sugar. None of that helped him.

But there were packets with a label he recognized, a sun figure.