Foreigner

That, God help them all, was the space program. And that was not worth a grin. That was every program they promoted. That was the operation of the council and the hasdrawad and the tashrid and the special interests that operated in the shadows–radical groups among those special interests, groups that called the Treaty of Mospheira a mistake, that called for those things the most radical humans–and God knew there were those–suspected as existing in extensive plans and Tabini dismissed as stupid, like another attack on Mospheira.

Humans might have no illusion of welcome in the world–but there were certainly the serious and the non‑serious threats. Serious, were the human‑haters who focussed on the highway dispute as a human plot to keep the economy under Tabini’s thumb–which cut much too close to the truth neither the paidhi nor the aiji wanted in public awareness.

There was, thank God, the moonbeam fringe–with a slippery grip on history, the laws of physics, and reality. The fringe went straight for the space program (one supposed because it was the highest and least conceivable technology) as the focus of all dire possibility, ideas ranging from the notion that rocket launches let the atmosphere leak out into the ether… to his personal favorite, the space station cruising at ground level causing hurricanes and blasting cities with death rays. Atevi could laugh at it. Humans could. Humor at the most outrageous hate‑mongering did everyone good, and poked holes in assumptions that otherwise would lie unventilated.

The fringe had done more good, in fact, for human‑atevi understanding than all his speeches to the councils.

But if you ever wanted a source from which a lunatic, unlicensed assassin could arise, it was possible that one of the fringe had quite, quite gone over the edge.

Maybe the numbers had said, to one of the lunatics, one fine day, Go assassinate the paidhi and the atmosphere will stop leaking.

Thus far… Tabini and his own predecessors at least juggled well. They’d dispensed technology at a rate that didn’t overwhelm the economy or the environment, they’d kept ethnic differences among atevi and political opinions among humans well to the rear of the decision‑making process–with the Ragi atevi and the Western Association they led profiting hand over fist, all the while, of course, by reason of their proximity to and special relationship with Mospheira; and, oh, well aware what that relationship was worth, economically. Tabini had probably had far more than an inkling for years where human advice and human techonology was leading him.

But Tabini’s association also enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, was very fond of its comforts and its television. And Ragi planes didn’t crash into bridges any more.

Somebody after Tabini’s hide was the likeliest scenario that kept bobbing up–a plausible scenario, in which the paidhi could remotely figure, if whoever was after Tabini, knowing how difficult a target Tabini was, would be content to take out Tabini’s contact with humans and make that relationship more difficult for a season.

A new paidhi, a state of destabilization in which no paidhi was safe. Somebody might even be after a renegotiation of the Mospheira Treaty to spread out the benefits to other associations, which had been proposed, and which the Western Association had adamantly refused.

In that case the paidhi‑aiji might well become a critical flash‑point. He got along with Tabini. He liked Tabini. Tabini didn’t reciprocate the liking part, of course–being atevi. But Tabini and he did get along with all too much levity and good humor, perhaps–as some might see it, like that business at the retreat at Taiben, far too cozy.

Some might think it, even among the Ragi themselves, or among the outlying allies, each of whom, in the nebulous fashion of atevi associations, had at least one foot in other associations.

Maybe the better, special relationship he thought he and Tabini had–had brought this on, transgressing some boundary too rapidly, too inexpertly, in blind, too‑confident enthusiasm.

Frightening thought. Appalling thought. Succeed too well and fail completely?

If Tabini’s government went unstable, and the network of atevi Associations shifted its center of gravity, say, eastward and deeply inland, where there was never that easy familiarity with humans, where ethnic and historical differences between Ragi and Nisebi and Meduriin could find only humans more different and more suspect than they found each other.

Atevi had been, with the exception of the tribals in the remotest hinterlands and the islands in the Edi Archipelago, a global civilization, at a stage when humans hadn’t been. Atevi explorers had gone out in wooden ships, done all those things that humans had, by the records, done on lost Earth–except that atevi hadn’t found a New World, they’d found the Edi, and damned little else but a volcanic, troubled chain of islands, not advanced, not culturally up to the double assault of the explorers from the East and the explorers from the West, who’d immediately laid claim to everything in sight and still–still, for reasons the ethnographers were still arguing–the same explorers met each other in those foreign isles and found enough in common and enough difficult about the intervening geography–the continental divide in the principal continent topped 30,000 feet–to trade not overland, but by sea routes that largely, after the advent of full‑rigged ships, excluded the Isles where the two principal branches of atevi had met.

Atevi had, historically, cooperated together damned well, compared to humans. Hence the difficulty of getting atevi to comprehend correctly that humans had been very willing to be let alone on Mospheira, and not included in an association–an attitude which the atevi turned out not to trust. Shejidan had thrown itself into the breach, sacrificed its fear of outsiders for the foreign concept of ‘treaty,’ which it marginally understood as the sought‑after association with humans. Which was one of the most critical conceptual breakthroughs the first paidhi had made.

To this day Tabini professed not to comprehend the human word ‘treaty,’ or the word ‘border,’ which he denied had real validity even among humans. An artificial concept, Tabini called it. A human delusion. People belonged to many associations. Boundaries might exist as an arbitrary approximate line defining provinces–but they were meaningless to individuals whose houses or kinships might be both sides of the line.

He lay in the dark, watching the moonlit curtains begin to blow in a generous cool breeze–the weather had greatly moderated since the front had come through last night. He hadn’t been in the garden this afternoon to enjoy it. Someone could shoot him from the rooftop, Jago said. He should stay out of the garden. He shouldn’t go here, he shouldn’t go there, he shouldn’t walk through crowds.

Damned if Banichi had forgotten his mail. Not Banichi. Things regarding the person Banichi was watching just weren’t trivial enough to Banichi that they completely left his mind. This was a man that, in the human expression, dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s.

Second frightening thought.

Why would Banichi steal his mail–except to rob him of information like ads for toothpaste, video tapes, and ski vacations on Mt. Allan Thomas?

And if it weren’t Banichi that had gotten it, why would Banichi lie to him? To protect a thief who stole advertising?

Stupid thought. Probably Banichi hadn’t lied at all, probably Banichi was just busy and he was, ever since the nightmare flash of that shadow across the curtain last night, suffering from jangled nerves and an overactive imagination.

He lay there, imagining sounds in the garden, smelling the perfume of the blooms outside the door, wondering what it sounded like when someone hit the wire and fried, and what he should do about the situation he was working on–

Or what the odds were that he could get Deana Hanks out of the Mospheira office to take up temporary duty in the aiji’s household, for, say, a month or so vacation–God, just time to see Barb, go diving on the coast, take reasonable chances with a hostile environment instead of a pricklish atevi court.

Cowardice, that was. It was nothing to toss in Hanks’ lap–oh, by the way, Deana, someone’s trying to kill me, give it your best, just do what you can and I’ll be back when it blows over.

He couldn’t escape that way. He didn’t know whether he should call his office and try to hint what was going on–he ran a high risk of injecting misinformation or misinterpretation into an already uneasy situation, if he did that. There were code phrases for trouble and for assassination–and maybe he ought to take the chance and let the office know that much.

But if Tabini for some reason closed off communications tighter than they were, the last information his office might have to work with was an advisement that someone had tried to kill him–leaving Hanks de facto in charge. And Hanks was a take charge and go ahead type, a damned hothead, was the sorry truth, apt to take measures to breach Tabini’s silence, which might not be the wisest course in a delicate atevi political situation. He had confidence in Tabini–Hanks under those circumstances wouldn’t, and might do something to undermine Tabini… or play right into the hands of Tabini’s enemies.

Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Tabini’s silence was uncharacteristic. The situation had too many variables. He was on‑site and he didn’t have enough information to act on–Hanks would have far less if she had to come in here, and she would feel more pressed, in the total absence of information, to do something to get him back if there was no corpse… a very real fear from the first days, that some aiji in Shejidan or elsewhere might get tired of having the paidhi dole out technological information bit at a time.

Something about the mythical goose and the source of golden eggs–a parable the first paidhim had been very forward to inject into atevi culture, so that now atevi were certain there was such a thing as a goose, although there was not a bona fide bird in the world, and that it was a foreign but surely atevi fable.

That was the way the game went. Given patience–given time–given small moves instead of wide ones, humans got what they wanted, and Tabini‑aiji did.

Goseniin and golden eggs.

III

« ^ »

B anichi arrived with breakfast, with an armload of mail, the predictable ads for vacations, new products, and ordinary goods. It was quite as boring as he’d expected it to be, and a chilly, unseasonal morning made him glad of the hot tea the two substitute servants brought. He had his light breakfast–now he wanted his television.

“Are the channels out all over the city, or what?” he asked Banichi, and Banichi shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

At least there was the weather channel, reporting rain in the mountains east, and unseasonal cool weather along the western seaboard. No swimming on the Mospheira beaches. He kept thinking of home–kept thinking of the white beaches of Mospheira, and tall mountains, still patched with snow in the shadowy spots, kept thinking of human faces, and human crowds.

He’d dreamed of home last night, in the two hours of sleep he seemed to have gotten–he’d dreamed of the kitchen at home, and early mornings, and his mother and Toby at breakfast, the way it had been. His mother wrote to him regularly. Toby wasn’t inclined to write, but Toby got the news, when his letters did get home, and Toby sent word back through their mother, what he was up to, how he was faring.

His mother had taken the community allotment he’d left when he’d won the paidhi’s place and had no more need for his birthright: she’d combined it with her savings from her teaching job, and lent his family‑bound and utterly respectable brother the funds to start a medical practice on the north shore.

Toby had the thoroughly ordinary and prosperous life their mother had wanted for herself or her children, with the appropriately adorable and available grandchildren. She was happy. Bren didn’t write her with things like, Hello, Mother, someone tried to shoot me in my bed. Hello, Mother, they won’t let me fly out of here. It was always, Hello, Mother, things are fine. How are you? They keep me busy. It’s very interesting. I wish I could say more than that…

“Not that coat,” Banichi said, as he took his plain one from the armoire. Banichi reached past him, and took the audience coat from the hanger.

“For the space council?” he protested, but he knew, he knew, then, without Banichi saying a word, that Tabini had called him.

“The council’s been postponed.” Banichi shook the coat out and held it for him, preempting the new servants’ offices. “The ratios in the slosh baffles will have to wait at least a few days.”

He slipped his arms into the coat, flipped his braid over the collar and settled it on with a deep breath. The weight wasn’t uncomfortable this crisp morning.

“So what does Tabini want?” he muttered. But both the servants were in the room, and he didn’t expect Banichi to answer. Jago hadn’t been there when he waked. Just Tano and his glum partner, bringing in his breakfast. He hadn’t had enough sleep, for two nights now. His eyes stung with exhaustion. And he had to look presentable and have his wits about him.

“Tabini is concerned,” Banichi said. “Hence the postponement. He wishes you to travel to the country this afternoon. A security team is going over the premises.”

“What, at the estate?”

“Stone by stone. Tano and Algini will pack for you, if necessary.”

What could he ask, when he knew Banichi wouldn’t answer–couldn’t answer a question Tabini hadn’t authorized him to answer? He took a deep breath, adjusted his collar, and looked in the mirror. His eyes showed the want of sleep–showed a modicum of panic, truth be known, because the decision not to call Mospheira was fast becoming an irrevocable one, with decreasing opportunities to change his mind on that score without making a major, noisy opposition to people whose polite maneuvering–if that was what he perceived around him–might not be profitable to challenge.

Maybe it was paralysis of will. Maybe it was instinct saying Be still– don’t defy the only friend humanity has on this planet.

Paidhiin are expendable. Mospheira isn’t. We can’t stand against the whole world. This time they have aircraft. And radar. And all the technological resources.

They’re very close to not needing us any more.

In the room behind him the door opened and Jago came in, he assumed to supervise the two servants, whose words to him had consisted in controversies like: “Preserves, nadi?” and “Sugar in the tea?”

Moni and Taigi had known answers like that without asking him at every turn. He missed them already. He feared they wouldn’t be back, that they’d already been reassigned–he hoped to a stable, influential, thoroughly normal atevi. He hoped they weren’t in the hands of the police, undergoing close questions about him, and humans in general.

Banichi opened the door a second time, for them to leave for the audience, and he went out with Banichi, feeling more like a prisoner than the object of so much official concern.

“Aiji‑ma.” Bren made the courteous bow, hands on knees. Tabini was in shirt and trousers, not yet at his formal best, sitting in the sunlight in front of the open doors–Tabini’s doors, high in the great mass of the Bu‑javid, faced not the garden, but the open sky, the descending terraces of the ancient walls, and the City that was the fortress’ skirt, a geometry of tile roofs, hazed and softened by the morning mist to faintest reds, roofs auspiciously aligned in their relationship to each other and in the city’s accommodation to the river. Beyond that, the Bergid range, riding above a haze of distance, far across the plains–a glorious view, a cool, breathless dawn.

The table was set in the light, half onto the balcony, against that prospect. And Tabini was having breakfast.

Tabini made a hand‑sign to his servants, who instantly procured two more cups, and drew out from the table the two other chairs.

So they were completely informal. He and Banichi sat down at the offered places, with the Bergid range a misty blue and the City spread out in faint tile reds below the balcony railing.

“I trust there’s been no repetition of the incident,” Tabini said.

“No, aiji‑ma,” Banichi answered, adding sugar.

“I’m very distressed by this incident,” Tabini said. A sip of tea. “Distressed also that you should be the object of public speculation, Bren‑paidhi. I was obliged to take a position. I could not let that pass.–Has anyone approached you in the meetings?”

“No,” Bren said. “But I do fear I was less than observant yesterday. I’m not used to this idea.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Disturbed.” He wasn’t sure, himself, what he felt. “Disturbed that I’ve been the cause of so much disarrangement, when I’m here for your convenience.”

‘That’s the politic answer.“

“–And I’m very angry, aiji‑ma.”

“Angry?”

“That I can’t go where I like and do what I like.”

“But can the paidhi ever do that? You never go to the City without an escort. You don’t travel, you don’t hold entertainments, which, surely, accounts for what Banichi would counsel you as habits of the greatest hazard.”

“This is my home , aiji‑ma. I’m not accustomed to slinking past my own doors or wondering if some poor servant’s going to walk through the door on my old key… I do hope someone’s warned them.”

“Someone has,” Banichi said.

“I worry,” he said, across the teacup. “Forgive me, aiji‑ma.”

“No, no, no, I did ask. These are legitimate concerns and legitimate complaints. And no need for you to suffer them. I think it would be a good thing for you to go to Malguri for a little while.”

“Malguri?” That was the lake estate, at Lake Maidingi–Tabini’s retreat in early autumn, when the legislature was out of session, when he was regularly on vacation himself. He had never been so far into the interior of the continent. When he thought of it–no human had. “Are you going, aiji‑ma?”

“No.” Tabini’s cup was empty. A servant poured another. Tabini studiously dropped in two sugar lumps and stirred. “My grandmother is in residence. You’ve not encountered her, personally, have you? I don’t recall you’ve had that adventure.”

“No.” He held the prospect of the aiji‑dowager more unnerving than assassins. Ilisidi hadn’t won election in the successions. Thank God. “Aren’t you–forgive me–sending me to a zone of somewhat more hazard?”

Tabini laughed, a wrinkling of his nose. “She does enjoy an argument. But she’s quite retiring now. She says she’s dying.”

“She’s said so for five years,” Banichi muttered. “Aiji‑ma.”

“You’ll do fine,” Tabini said. “You’re a diplomat. You can deal with it.”

“I could just as easily go to Mospheira and absent myself from the situation, if that’s what’s useful. A great deal more useful, actually, to me. There’s a load of personal business I’ve had waiting. My mother has a cabin on the north coast…”

Tabini’s yellow stare was completely void, completely implacable. “But I can’t guarantee her security. I’d be extremely remiss to bring danger on your relatives.”

“No ateva can get onto Mospheira without a visa.”

“An old man in a rowboat can get onto Mospheira,” Banichi muttered. “And ask me if I could find your mother’s cabin.”

The old man in a rowboat would not get onto Mospheira unnoticed. He was willing to challenge Banichi on that. But he wasn’t willing to own that fact to Tabini or Banichi for free.

“You’ll be far better off,” Banichi said, “at Malguri.”

“A fool tried my bedroom door! For all I know it was my next door neighbor coming home drunk through the garden, probably terrified he could be named an attempted assassin, and now we have wires on my doors!” One didn’t shout in Tabini’s presence. And Tabini had supported Banichi in the matter of the wires. He remembered his place and hid his consternation behind his teacup.

Tabini sipped his own and set the cup down as Banichi set his aside. “Still,” Tabini said. “The investigation is making progress which doesn’t need your help. Rely on my judgment in this. Have I ever done anything to your harm?”

“No, aiji‑ma.”

Tabini rose and reached out his hand, not an atevi custom. Tabini had done it the first time ever they met, and at rare moments since. He stood up and took it, and shook it solemnly.

“I hold you as a major asset to my administration,” Tabini said. “Please believe that what I do is out of that estimation, even this exile.”

“What have I done?” he asked, his hand still prisoner in Tabini’s larger one. “Have I, personally, done something I should have done differently? How can I do better, if no one advises me?”

“We’re pursuing the investigation,” Tabini said quietly. “My private plane is fueling at this moment. Please don’t cross my grandmother.”

“How can I escape it? I don’t know what I did to bring this about, Tabini‑aiji. How can I behave any more wisely than I have?”

A pressure of Tabini’s fingers, and a release of his hand. “Did one say it was your fault, Bren‑paidhi? Give my respects to my grandmother.”

“Aiji‑ma.” Surrender was all Tabini left him. He only dared the most indirect rebellion. “May I have my mail routed there?”

“There should be no difficulty,” Banichi said, “if it’s sent through the security office.”

“We don’t want to announce your destination,” Tabini said. “But, yes, security does have to know. Take care. Take every precaution. You’ll go straight to the airport. Is it taken care of, Banichi?”

“No difficulty,” Banichi said. What ‘it’ was, Bren had no idea. But there was nothing left him but to take his formal leave.

‘Straight to the airport,’ meant exactly that, evidently, straight downstairs, in the Bu‑javid, to the lowest, inner level, where a rail station connected with the rail systems all over the continent.

It was a well‑securitied place, this station deep in the Bu‑javid’s heart, a station which only the mai’aijiin and the aiji himself and his staff might use–there was another for common traffic, a little down the hill.

Guards were everywhere, nothing unusual in any time he’d been down here. He supposed they maintained a constant watch over the tracks and the cars that rested here–the authorities in charge could have no idea when someone might take the notion to use them, or when someone else might take the notion to compromise them.

What looked like a freight car was waiting. The inbound tram would sweep it up on its way below–and it would travel looking exactly like a freight car, mixed in with the ordinary traffic, down to its painted and, one understood, constantly changed, numbers.

It was Tabini’s–cushioned luxury inside, a council‑room on wheels. That was where Banichi took him.

“Someone has checked it out,” he said to Banichi. He’d used this particular car himself–but only once annually on his own business, on his regular departure to the airport, and never when there was any active feud in question. The whole proceedings had a surreal feeling.

“Destined for the airport,” Banichi said, checking papers, “no question. Don’t be nervous, nadi Bren. I assure you we won’t misplace you with the luggage.”

Banichi was joking with him. He was scared. He’d been nervous walking down here, was nervous on the platform, but he walked to the back of the windowless car and sat down on the soft cushions of a chair, unable to see anything but the luxury around him, and a single televised image of the stationside with its hurrying workers. He was overwhelmed with the feeling of being swallowed alive, swept away to where no one human would ever hear of him. He hadn’t advised anyone where he was going, he hadn’t gotten off that phone call to Hanks or a letter home–he had no absolute confidence now that Banichi would deliver it if he wrote it this instant and entrusted it to him to take outside.

“Are you going with me?” he asked Banichi.

“Of course.” Banichi was standing, looking at the monitor. “Ah. There she is.”

A cart had appeared from a lift, a cart piled high with white plastic boxes. Jago was behind it, pushing it toward the car. It arrived, real and stuck on the uneven threshold, and Jago shoved and swore as Banichi moved to lend a hand. Bren got up to offer his efforts, but at that moment it came across, as Tano turned up, shoving from the other side, bound inside, too.

The cart and the baggage had to mass everything he had had in the apartment, Bren thought in dismay, unless three‑quarters of that was Banichi’s and Jago’s luggage. They didn’t take the luggage from the cart: they secured the whole cart against the forward wall, with webbing belts.

Protests did no good. Questions at this point only annoyed those trying to launch them with critical things they needed. Bren sat down and stayed still while Banichi and Jago went outside, never entirely leaving the threshold, and signed something or talked with other guards.

In a little while, they both came back into the car, saying that the train was on its way, and would couple them on in a few minutes. Tano meanwhile offered him a soft; drink, which he took listlessly, and Algini arrived with a final paper for Banichi to sign.

What? Bren asked himself. Concerning what? His commitment to Malguri, might it be?

To the aiji‑dowager’s prison, where she was dying–this notorious, bitter woman, twice passed over for aiji.

One wondered if she had had a choice in lodgings, or whether the rumors about her were true… that, having offended Tabini, she had very little choice left.

The jet made a quick rise above the urban sprawl of Shejidan–one could pick out the three or four major central buildings among the tiled roofs, the public Registry, the Agricultural Association, the long complex of Shejidan Steel, the spire of Western Mining and Industry, the administrative offices of Patanadi Aerospace. A final turn onto their course swept the Bu‑javid past the aircraft’s wing‑tip, a sweep of fortified hill, interlocked squares of terraces and gardens–Bren imagined he could see the very court where he had lived… and wondered in a moment of panic if he would ever see his apartment again.

They reached cruising altitude–above the likely capability of random private operators. A drink appeared. Tano’s efficiency. Tano’s proper concern. Bren sulked, not wanting to like Tano, who’d replaced the servants he very much liked, who had had their jobs with him since he’d taken up residence in Shejidan, and who probably had been transferred by a faceless bureaucracy without so much as an explanation. It wasn’t fair to them. It wasn’t fair to him. He liked them, even if they probably wouldn’t understand that idea. He was used to them and they were gone.

But sulking at Tano and Algini wasn’t a fair treatment of the new servants, either: he knew it and, in proper atevi courtesy, tried not to show his resentment toward them, or his feelings at all, toward two strangers. He sat back instead with as placid a face as he could manage and watched the land and the clouds pass under the wing, wishing he was flying instead toward Mospheira, and safety.

And wishing Banichi and Jago were culturally or biologically wired to understand the word ‘friend’ or ‘ally’ the way he wanted to mean it. That, too. But that was as likely as his walking the Mospheira straits barefoot.

His stomach was upset. He was all but convinced now that he had made a very serious mistake in not calling Deana Hanks directly after the incident, while the attempt on his bedroom was still a matter of hot pursuit, and before Banichi and Jago might have received specific orders to prevent him calling.

But he hadn’t even thought of it then–he couldn’t remember what he had been thinking, and decided he must have gone into mental shock, trying first to dismiss the whole matter and to look brave in front of Banichi; then he’d launched himself into ‘handling it,’ even to a fear of Hanks’ seizing control over the situation–meaning he was losing his grip on matters, and knew it, and was still denying things were out of control.

Now he was well past the end of his options for action, so far as he could see, unless he wanted to contemplate outright rebellion against Tabini’s invitation to an estate hours away from the City–unless he was willing to break away in that remote airport screaming kidnap and murder, and appealing to the casual citizen for rescue from the aiji.

Foolish notion. Foolish as the notion of refusing Tabini in the invitation, under the terms he had had–and now that he began to think about phones and the lake estate, and getting any call out to Mospheira, from where he was going–the request to transfer a call to the Mospheira phone system would have to go back through the Bu‑javid for authorization, so it was the same damned thing.

Eventually his office on Mospheira would wonder why he hadn’t called… in, say, a week or two of silence. It wasn’t unusual, that lapse of time between his calls and consultations. And, after that two weeks of silence, his office might be worried enough to think about contacting Foreign Affairs, over them, who would tell them to wait while they went through channels.

In another week, Foreign Affairs on Mospheira might have exhausted the approved channels it had at its disposal, and decided to send a memo to the President, who might, might, after consulting the Departments in Council, make personal inquiries of his own and finally lay the inquiry on Tabini’s doorstep.

Count it the better part of a month before Mospheira decided for certain that Shejidan had somehow misplaced the paidhi.

Disturbing, to discover that individual atevi he had personally thought he understood and an atevi society he had thought he intellectually understood suddenly weren’t acting in any predictable way. He felt it as an offense to his pride that he found nothing now wiser or more resourceful to do than to pretend he was utterly naive and that he wasn’t actually being kidnapped across the country–where, face it, he could disappear for good and all. Nobody from Mospheira, not even Hanks, was going to fracture the Treaty looking for a paidhi who just might have made some unforgivable mistake.

Hell, no, they wouldn’t demand him back. They’d just send a new one, with as good a briefing as they could manage and instructions to pull in a bit and not to be so stupid.

He’d trusted so implicitly… never expected Tabini to be other than a hundred percent for atevi and his own personal interests, but he’d always believed he knew what those interests were. Tabini hadn’t resisted his suggestions: not in the rail system, not the space program, not medical research, not the computerization of the supply system. Tabini wasn’t opposed to anything he’d put forward, or, for God’s sake, Tabini could have said something, and they could have talked about it–but, no, Tabini had listened with intelligent interest, asking lively questions–Tabini’s predecessors had all listened to reason, and invested themselves to the hilt in the interlocking of ecology and technological advance, a concept that atevi were quick to understand.

Reciprocally, there’d never been anything an aiji of Tabini’s house had asked that humans hadn’t done, or given, or tried to comply with, since the War of the Landing itself, right down to his current paper regarding processed meat, which tried… tried to explain to Mospheira that commercialization of meat production was deeply offensive to Ragi, no matter that Nisebi saw nothing wrong with it and were willing to sell. That cultural adaptation went both ways, and Mospheira ought to rely on the sea, and fish, which had no season, and thereby show their hosts on the planet that they had made an effort to change themselves to conform to atevi sensibilities, the way atevi had changed their behaviors toward humans…

Sometimes his job seemed like rolling the proverbial boulder uphill. Just not losing ground seemed hard.

But atevi were on the very threshold of manned space‑flight. They had satellite communications. They had a reliable light launch system. They were on the verge of developing the materials that, with human advice, could leapfrog them past the steps humans had taken getting down here, right to powered descent, interlinked maneuvering–terms he was having to learn, concepts that he was studying up on during his so‑called fall vacations, cramming into his head the details behind the next policy paper he might give–that he ached to give–some time in the next five years, granted the intermediate heavy‑lift rocket was going to work.

Not even that they absolutely needed to take that step; but the office on Mospheira said stall, let atevi develop the intermediate lift capacity. The quality in the synthetic materials wasn’t there yet, and the chemical rocket lifter and the early manned experience would give atevi the experience and the political and emotional investment in space–atevi were much on heroes. It was a cultural decision, a scientific decision… it disappointed hell out of him, because he wanted to be the paidhi that put them a hundred percent into the business of space, and he wanted it while he was young enough to go up himself. That was his secret, personal dream, that if atevi were going to trust any human to go, they might trust the paidhi, and he wanted to be that person, and steer the attitudes if not the spacecraft–

That was the dream he had. The nightmare was less specific, only the apprehension which, long before the assassin tried his bedroom, he had been trying to communicate to Hanks and the rest of the office, that you couldn’t go on giving atevi bits and pieces of tech without accelerating the randomness in the process, meaning that atevi minds didn’t work the same as human minds, and that atevi cultural bias was going to view certain technological advances differently than humans did, and atevi inventiveness was going to put more and more items together into their own inventions, about which they didn’t consult the Mospheira Technology Commission.

Thank God so far the independent inventions hadn’t been ICBMs or atomic bombs. But he knew, as every paidhi before him had known, that, if someday the Treaty broke down, he’d be the first to know.

He watched the land pass under the wings, the farmland, the free ranges and forests… eventually a tide of cloud rolled under them, with the black, snow‑capped peaks of the Bergid thrusting up like steep‑sided islands–fascinating, to see the edge of his visible world go past, and exciting, in a disturbing way, to be seeing country humans never saw. Everything was new, hitherto forbidden.

But after a time, cloud closed in around the peaks, and while the sky remained blue, there was a sheet of wrinkled white under them, hiding the land.

Disappointing. This sort of thing set in over the strait and didn’t let up. Even the planet kept atevi secrets.

Which didn’t mean there wasn’t useful work he could do while he was being kidnapped. He’d rescued his computer from baggage. He set it up on the table and brought up his notes for the end of the quarter development conference, his arguments for creating a computer science center in Costain Bay, modem‑linked to atevi students in Wingin.

If there is , he wrote now, one area of technological difficulty, it is ironically in mathematics, in which the different uses of mathematics by our separate cultures and languages have led to different expressions of mathematics at an operational level. While these different perceptions of math are a rich field for speculation by mathematicians and computer designers for the future, for the present, these foundational differences in concept remain an obstacle particularly to the beginning atevi computer student attempting to comprehend a logical machine which ignores certain of his expectations, which ignores the operational conveniences and shortcuts of his language, and which proceeds by a logical architecture adapted over centuries to the human mind .

The development of a computer architecture in agreement with atevi perceptions is both inevitable and desirable for the economic progress of the atevi associations, particularly in materials development, but the paidhi respectfully urges that many useful and lifesaving technologies are being delayed in development because of this difficulty.

While the paidhi recognizes the valid and true reasons for maintaining the doctrine of Separation in the Treaty of Mospheira, it seems that computer technology itself can become the means to link instructors on Mospheira with students on the mainland, so that atevi students may have the direct benefit of study with human masters of design and theory, to bring computers with all their advantages into common usage – while encouraging atevi students to devise interfacing software which may take advantage of atevi mathematical skills .

Such a study center may serve as a model program, moreover, for finding other areas in which atevi may, without harm to either culture, interface directly in the territory of empirical science and form working agreements which seem appropriate to both cultures.

I call to mind the specific language of the Treaty of Mospheira which calls for experimental contacts in science leading to agreements of definition and unequivocal terminology, with a view to future intercultural cooperations under the appointment of appropriate atevi officials.

This seems to me one of those areas in which cooperation could work to the benefit of atevi, widening inter‑cultural understanding, fulfilling all provisions of the Treaty wherein…

Banichi dropped into the seat opposite.

“You’re so busy,” Banichi said.

“I was writing my text for the quarterly conference. I trust I’ll get back for it.”

“Your safety is of more concern. But if it should be that you can’t attend, certainly I’ll see that it reaches the conference.”

“There surely can’t be a question. The conference is four weeks away.”

“Truthfully, I don’t know.”

Don’t know, he thought in alarm. Don’t know– But Jago set a drink in front of Banichi, and sat down, herself, in the other seat facing his. “It’s a pleasant place,” Jago said. “You’ve never been there.”

“No. To Taiben. Not to Malguri.” Politeness, he could do on autopilot, while he was frantically trying to frame a euphemism for kidnapping. He saved his work down hard and folded up the computer. “But four weeks, nadi! I can’t do my work from halfway across the country.”

“It’s an opportunity,” Banichi said. “No human before you, nand’ paidhi, has made this trip. Don’t be so glum.”

“What of the aiji‑dowager? Sharing accommodations with a member of the aiji’s family, with a woman I don’t know–has anyone told her I’m coming?”

Banichi drew back his lip from his teeth, a fierce amusement.

“You’re resourceful, paidhi‑ji. Surely you can deal with her. She’d have been the aiji, for your predecessor, at least…”

“Except for the hasdrawad,” Jago said.

The hasdrawad had chosen her son, whom she’d wished aloud she’d aborted when she’d had the chance, as the story ran; then, adding insult to injury, the hasdrawad had passed over her a second time when her son was assassinated–ignoring her claims to the succession, in favor of her grandson, Tabini.

“She favors Tabini,” Banichi said. “Contrary to reports. She always has favored him.”

She’d fallen, riding in the hunt, at seventy‑two. Broke her shoulder, broke her arm and four ribs, got up and rode through the rest of the course, until they’d caught the quarry.

Then she’d attacked the course manager with her riding crop, for the lost hide on her precious, high‑bred Matiawa jumper–as the story went.

“Her reputation,” Bren said judiciously, “is not for patience.”

“Oh, very much it is,” Jago said “When she wants something that needs it.”

“Is it true, what people say about the succession?”

“That Tabini‑aiji’s father died by assassination?” Banichi said. “Yes.”

“They never found the agency,” said Jago. “And very competent people searched.”

“Not a clue to be had–except in the dowager’s satisfaction,” said Banichi. “Which isn’t admissible evidence.–She wasn’t, of course, the only one so motivated. But her personal guard is no slight matter.”

“Licensed?” Bren asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Banichi.

“Most of her guard are old,” Jago said. “A bit behind the times.”

“Now,” said Banichi. “But I wouldn’t say they were, then.”

“And this is where Tabini‑aiji sends me for safety?”

“The aiji‑dowager does favor him,” Jago said. “Well, in most regards,” Banichi said.

The plane thumped onto the runway in a blinding downpour–other planes had been diverted out to the lowland airport. Banichi said so. But the aiji’s crew went right on through. Engines reversed thrust, brakes screeched on wet pavement, the plane veered into a controlled right turn and blazed a fast track to the small terminal.

Bren stared glumly at the weather, at guards and trucks hurrying out to the aiji’s plane–a more elaborate reception than he got at Mospheira. But, then, the people meeting him on Mospheira didn’t carry guns.

He unbelted, got up with his computer, and followed Banichi to the door as the pilot opened it, with Jago close in attendance.

Rain whipped into their faces, a mist thick enough to breathe. Rain spattered the pavement of the runway. It veiled the scenery in gray, so the lake visible from the airport melded seamlessly with the sky, and the hills around it were banks of shadow against that sky.

Malguri, he thought, must be somewhere on those high shores, overlooking the lake.

“They’re sending a car,” Jago yelled into their ears–had pocket‑com in hand, as a crew began pulling up a movable stairs for their descent. The device had no rain canopy such as Shejidan airport afforded. One supposed they were expected to make a dash for it, down the steps.

One wondered whether, if Tabini had been on the plane, they would have found such a canopy. Or parked the car closer.

Thunder rumbled, and lightnings glared off the wet concrete.

“Auspicious,” Bren muttered, far from anxious to venture metal steps in the frequent lightning. But the stairs thumped against the side of the plane, rocking it; rain gusted in, cold as autumn.

The raincoated attendants yelled and beckoned them to come ahead. Banichi went. Hell, he thought, and ducked through the door and hurried after, clinging to the cold, slick metal hand‑grip, flinching as lightning lit the ladder and the pavement and thunder cracked overhead. Light up like a candle, they would. He reached the bottom and left the metal ladder with relief, spied Banichi at the open door of the transport van, and, trying not to slip on the pavement, ran for it, with Jago rattling her way down the steps behind him.

He reached shelter. Jago arrived, close behind him, flung herself into the seat, rain glistening on her black skin, as the van driver got out to close the van door and stopped to stare, wide‑eyed, while the cold mist gusted in. Evidently no one had told the driver a human was in the party.

“Shut the door!” Banichi said, and the drenched driver slammed it and made haste to climb in his seat in front.

“Algini and Tano,” Bren protested, leaning to glance back at the plane, through a rain‑spotted window, as the driver’s door shut.

“They’ll bring the baggage,” Jago said. “In another car.”

In case of bombs, Bren supposed glumly, as the driver took off the brake, threw the van into gear and launched into what must be the standard verbal courtesies, gamely wishing them Welcome to Maidingi, Jewel of the Mountains, a practiced patter that went on into the felicitous positioning of the mountains, cosmically harmonious and fortunate, and the ‘grateful influences’ of the mountain springs above the Lake, the Mirror of Heaven.

The Mirror of Heaven reflected nothing, at the moment. Rain shattered the images of drowned buildings and gray void beyond the glass as the car sped along–Bren had expected them to pull up at the terminal and catch a train to Malguri, but the van had whisked them right past the terminal entrances, one and the next and the next, as they headed for the wire fence and the lake.

“Where are we going?” Bren asked, casting anxious glances at Banichi–surely, he thought, Banichi would protest this strange detour; possibly they were all in danger and he should keep his mouth shut.

“ This is scheduled, nadi,” Jago said, laying a hand on his knee. “Everything as arranged.”

“ What’s arranged?” He was short of temper. He divided his attention nervously between the oncoming fence and Jago’s placid face, then paid it all to the fence, as collision seemed imminent.

But the driver swung toward a gate, which opened automatically in front of them. And Jago hadn’t answered him. “Where are we going?”

“Be calm,” Banichi said quietly. “Please take my assurances, nand’ paidhi, everything is quite in order.”

“Aren’t we taking the rail?”

“There’s no rail to Malguri,” Banichi said. “One goes by car.”

One wasn’t supposed to go by car. There wasn’t supposed to be a car link between an airport and any end destination, no matter how rich one was: the nearest rail link was supposed to be the rule… and was there no rail at all between Malguri and the airport?

The designation on the van, written in large letters right above the driver, was, Maidingi Air… and did an airline vehicle regularly serve private destinations? They weren’t licensed to be a ground transport.

Maybe it was a special authorization security had. But was it that dire an emergency?

“Are we afraid to hire a bus?” he asked, and indicated, right in front of them, and clear to be read, Maidingi Air.

“There’s no bus to Malguri.”

“It’s the law. There’s supposed to be a hired bus…”

The van caught an abrupt turn and threw him against Jago’s arm.

Jago patted his leg, and he folded his arms and sank back to reassemble the pieces of his dignity and his self‑possession, while the thunder rumbled.

There were places where the local tech hadn’t caught up to the regulations. There were places with economic exceptions.

But the aiji’s own holding damned sure wasn’t one. Tabini couldn’t hire a bus? Or the bus to Maidingi Township didn’t serve Malguri, when it was right next door? The aiji was supposed to set an example of environmental compliance. Kabiu . Good precedent. Correct behavior. Appearances.

Where in hell was the estate, that the town bus couldn’t get them there?

Gravel scattered under the tires, and the van jolted onto a road in which gray void was on one side and a mountain on the other. The road ceased to be Improved in any sort, and one recalled the vetoes of one’s predecessor, overriding the access highway bill from the high villages–and one’s own assertion to the aiji, mildly tipsy, that such would ‘undermine the rail priority,’ that the appeal from the mountain villages was a smoke screen–the aiji had taken to that expression with delight, once he understood it–covering provincial ambitions and leading provincial aijiin to sedition.

It was the identical argument his predecessors had used–he had been queasy about the paranoid logic it encouraged in Tabini, from an ethical standpoint–but Tabini had seemed to accept it as perfectly reasonable atevi logic, and the paidhi didn’t vary from his predecessors’ arguments for mere human reasons: the paidhi adhered to what had worked with past administrations, argued by atevi logic, unless he had very carefully worked out a change and passed it by council.

And this road was evidently the by‑product of that logic, founded on his predecessor’s vetoes over the highway system, and sustained on his own.

No bus. No pavement.

He skiied, on his vacations. He was a passionate skiier. He had been on interesting roads, up Mt. Allan Thomas, on Mospheira.

Paved roads. Thank you. Going down a mountain on skis was one thing.

This…

… vehicle was not designed to climb. It slipped on the turns.

He clutched his computer to keep it from sliding to the rear of the van. He thought he might change his recommendation on the non‑township roads proposal.

The van ground its way for what felt like well over an hour up rainwashed gravel, whined and slipped and struggled around an uphill serpentine curve with a spit of gravel from beneath the wheels at the last. Gray space and driving rain filled the windows on every side but one. The van lurched upward into void, tilted, and Bren held to the seat white‑knuckled with his free hand, Jago swaying into him, with what might be Lake Maidingi or empty air beside and below and in front of him–he didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to imagine.

How long would it take searchers to find them if a tire slipped off the rain‑washed edge, and they plunged off into the lake?

Another jolt–a slip. “God!”

The driver gave him a startled look in the rearview mirror that took his attention from the wheel. Bren clamped his mouth shut after that. But Banichi and the driver started a conversation–during which the driver kept looking to the back seat to make his points.

“Please, nadi!” Bren said.

Gravel went over the edge. Their right tires bridged a washout and narrowly missed the rim. He was certain of it.

Then, around that curve, curtained in rain, a mass of shadow towered on the gray brink. Stone towers and spires rose there, in a rain‑crystaled spatter on the glass–he couldn’t tell where the road was, now, except the rattle of gravel under the tires assured him they were still on it.

“Malguri,” Banichi said in his deep tones.

“A fortress of the forty‑third century,” the driver said, “the architectural jewel of this province… maintained under the provincial trust, an autumn residence of the aiji‑major, currently of the aiji‑dowager…”

He sat and hugged his computer case and watched as the towers grew larger in the windshield, as they gathered detail out of the universal gray of the mist, the lake below, and the clouds… then acquired colors, the dark gray of stone and the rain‑soaked drip of heraldic banners from the uppermost tiers.

He was used to atevi architecture, was accustomed to antiquity in the City, and found it in the customs of the aiji’s hall, but this place, bristling with turrets and castellations, was not the style of the Landing, like so much of Shejidan. The date the driver had given them was from long, long before humans had ever come into the system, from long before there had ever been a strayed ship or a space station–before–he made a fast re‑reckoning–there’d been a human in space at all.

The wipers cleared the scene in alternate blinks, a world creating and recreating itself out of primeval deluge as wooden gates yawned for them and let them inside, onto a stone‑paved road that curved beneath a broad, sheltering portico, where the rain only scarcely reached.

The van stopped. Banichi got up and opened the door from inside, on a darkly shadowed porch and open wooden doors. A handful of atevi hastened out of that warm, gold‑lit darkness to meet the van–in casual dress, all of them, which fit what Bren knew of country life. Except the boots, it was attire appropriate to a hunting lodge like Taiben, which Bren supposed that Malguri was, in fact, considering the wild land around it… probably very good hunting, when some more energetic member of the aiji’s family was in residence.

He followed Banichi out of the van, computer in hand, reckoning, now that he saw the style of the place, that there might even be formal hunts while they were here, if the staff lent itself to entertaining the guests. Banichi and Jago would certainly be keen for it. He wouldn’t: tramping through dusty weeds, getting sunburn, and staring at his supper down a gun barrel was not his favorite sport. He was concerned for his computer in the cold mist that was whirling about them, sucked under the portico by the drafts; and he was more than anxious to conclude the welcome and get in out of the wet.

“The paidhi,” Banichi was saying, and Banichi laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Bren Cameron, the close associate of Tabini‑aiji, the very person, give him good welcome…” It was the standard formality. Bren bowed, murmured, “Honor and thanks,” in reply to the staff’s courtesies, while Jago banged the van door shut and dismissed the driver. The van whined off into the storm and somehow the whole welcoming party advanced, by degrees and inquiries into the aiji’s health and well‑being, across the cobbles toward the main doors–thank God, Bren thought. A backward glance in response to a question spotted an antique cannon in the paved courtyard, through veils of rain; a forward glance met gold, muted light coming through the doors on a wave of warmer air.

It was a stone‑paved hall, with timbered and plastered walls. The banners that hung from the time‑blackened rafters looked centuries old themselves, with their muted colors and complex serpentine patterns of ancient writing that, no, indeed, the paidhi didn’t know. He recognized Tabini’s colors, and the centermost banner had Tabini’s personal emblem, the baji on a red circle, on a blue field. There were weapons on every wall–swords and weapons the names of which he didn’t know, but he’d seen them in the lodge at Taiben, with similar hides, spotted and shaded, pinned on walls, thrown over chairs that owed nothing to human designs.

Banichi seized him by the shoulder again and made further introductions, this time to two servants, both male, introductions which required another round of bows.

“They’ll take you to your rooms,” Banichi said. “They’ll be assigned to you.”

He’d already let the names slip his attention. But, was on his tongue to say,–but what about Algini and Tano, on their way from the airport? Why someone else?

“Excuse me,” he said, and bowed in embarrassment. “I lost the names.” The paidhi was a diplomat, the paidhi didn’t let names get away like that, even names of servants–he wasn’t focussing, even yet, asking himself whether these servants were ones Banichi knew, or Jago did, or how they could trust these people.

But they bowed and patiently and courteously said their names again: Maigi and Djinana, honored to be at his service.

Dreadful beginning, with atevi trying to be polite to him. He was being pushed and shoved into places he didn’t know in a culture already full of strangenesses, and he was overwhelmed with the place.

“Go with them,” Banichi said gently, and added something in one of the regional languages, to which the servants nodded and bowed, regarding him with faces as impassive as Banichi’s and Jago’s.

“Nand’ paidhi,” one said. Maigi. He had to get them straight.

Maigi and Djinana, he said over and over to himself, as he followed them across the hall, through the archway, and to the foot of bronze‑banistered stone stairs, He realized of a sudden they had just passed out of the sight of Jago and Banichi, but Banichi had said go, Banichi evidently believed they were trustworthy. He had no wish to insult the servants twice by doubting them.

So it was up the stairs, into the upper floor of a strange house ruled by a stranger old woman. The servants he followed talked together in a language the paidhi didn’t know, and the place smelled of stone and antiquity. Plastering didn’t exist in these wooden‑floored upper halls, which, he supposed, were for lesser guests. Pipes and wires ran across ceilings clearly ancient, and bare tungsten‑based bulbs hung in brackets festooned by aged copper‑centered insulated wire, covered with dust.

This is Tabini’s hospitality? he asked himself. This is how his grandmother lives?

He didn’t believe it. He was offended, outright offended, and somewhat hurt, that Tabini sent him to this dingy, depressing house, with out‑of‑date plumbing and God knew what kind of beds.

They were running out of hallway. Two huge doors closed off the end. More hiking, he supposed glumly, into some gloomy cubbyhole remote from the activity of the dowager and her staff.

It probably wasn’t Tabini’s fault. It might be the dowager had countermanded Tabini’s arrangements. Grandmother might not want a human in her house, and might lodge him under a stairs or in a storeroom somewhere. Banichi and Jago would object when they found out. Grandmother would take offense, Tabini would take offense…

The servants opened the doors, on carpet, a spacious sitting room and furniture… God, gilt, carved over every surface, carpets that weren’t, Bren suddenly realized, mill‑produced. The soft, pale light came from a large, pointed‑arched window with small rectangular panes, bordered in amber and blue panes–a beautiful frame on a gray, rain‑spattered nothing.

“This is the paidhi’s reception room,” Maigi said, as Djinana opened another, side door and showed him into an equally ornate room with a blazing fireplace–illicit heating source, he said to himself in a remote, note‑taking, area of his brain; but the forebrain was busy with other details, the heads and hides and weapons on the walls, the carved wooden furniture, the antique carpet with the baji‑naji medallions endlessly repeated, identical windows in the next room, which, though smaller, was no less ornate.

“The private sitting room,” Maigi said, then flung open the doors on a windowless side room of the same style, with a long, polished wood table from end to end. “The dining room,” Maigi said, and went on to point out the hanging bell‑pull that would summon them, “Like that in the sitting room,” Maigi said, and drew him back to be assured he saw it.

Bren drew a deep breath. Everywhere it was stone walls and polished wooden floors, and dim lights, and gilt… a museum tour, it began to be, with Maigi and Djinana pointing out particular record heads of species three of which they confessed to be extinct, and explaining certain furnishings of historical significance.

“Given by the aiji of Deinali province on the marriage of the fourth dynasty aiji’s heir to the heir of Deinali, which, however, was never consummated, due to the death of the aiji’s heir in a fall from the garden walk…”

What garden walk? he asked himself, determined, under the circustances, to avoid the fatal area himself.

It was the paranoia of the flight here working on his nerves. It must be.

Or it might be the glass eyes of dead animals staring at him, mute and helpless.

Maigi opened yet another door, on a bedroom far, far larger than any reasonable bedroom needed to be, with–Bren supposed at least it was a bed and not a couch–an affair on a dais, with spears upholding the curtains which mostly enfolded it, a bed smothered in skins of animals and set on a stonework dais. Maigi showed him another bellpull, and briskly led him on to yet–God!–a farther hall.

He followed, beginning to feel the entire matter of the paidhi’s accommodations ridiculously out of control. Maigi opened a side door to a stone‑floored room with a hole in the floor, a silver basin, and a stack of linen towels. “The accommodation,” Maigi pronounced it, euphemismistically. “Please use the towels provided. Paper jams the plumbing.”

He supposed his consternation showed. Maigi took up a dipper from the polished silver cauldron, an ornate dipper, and poured it down the hole in the floor.

“Actually,” Djinana said, “there’s continual water action. The aiji Padigi had it installed in 4879. The dipper remains, for the towels, of course.”

It was genteel, it was elegant, it was… appalling, was the feeling he had about it. Atevi weren’t animals. He wasn’t. He couldn’t use this. There had to be something else, downstairs, perhaps; he’d find out, and walk that far.

Djinana opened a double door beyond the accommodation, which let into a bath, an immense stone tub, with pipes running across the floor. “Mind your step, nadi,” Djinana said. Clearly plumbing here was an afterthought, too, and the volume of water one used for a single bath had to be immense.

“Your own servants will light the fires for you each evening,” Djinana said, and demonstrated that there was running water, while he absorbed that small advisement that Aigini and Tano were not lost, his luggage might yet make it, and he might not be alone with Djinana and Maigi after all.

Meanwhile Maigi had opened up the boiler, which was mounted on the stone wall, and which had two pipes running into it from overhead, down the wall: the larger one had to be cold water entering the boiler and a hot water conduit carried it out and across to the tub; but he was puzzled by the second, thinner pipe–until he realized that small blue flame in the boiler compartment must be supplied by that smaller gauge pipe. Methane gas. An explosion waiting to happen. An asphyxiation, if the little flame went out and let gas accumulate in the bath.

My God, he thought, racking up violation after violation, several of them potentially lethal as the two servants led the way back through the accommodation and into the hall.

Had Tabini sent him here for safety? Now that he understood what some of these pipes and electric lines must be, he traced other after‑thought installations in the ancient stonework, some of which he realized now were certainly carrying methane, throughout the apartments and elsewhere, others of which were an antique electric supply, a source of sparks.

The building was still standing. The wiring was very old. So were the pipes. Evidently the staff had been careful… thus far.

“We, of course, are at your service,” Maigi said as they walked. “Your own staff should be arriving soon. They’ll lodge in the servants’ quarters, too. One ring for them, for personal needs; two for us, for food, for adjustment in the accommodations. We serve Malguri itself, and of course, provide its hospitality in any special requirements the paidhi might have.”

Djinana led the way back to the sitting room–an expedition in itself–and taking a small leather‑bound codex from a table, presented it to him along with a pen, “Please add your name to the distinguished guests,” Djinana requested of him, and, as he prepared to do so; “It would be a further distinction, nadi, if you’d sign in your own language. That’s never been, before.”

“Thank you,” he said, quite touched, actually, at the implication of genuine welcome in this shrine, and duly signed in atevi script and, with, ironically, less practice, in Mosphei’.

He heard thumping in the hall. He looked up.

“Doubtless your servants,” Maigi said, and a moment later saw Tano with two big boxes, headed in through the outer door, and, imperiling an antique table, through the reception room.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Tano said, out of breath, and rain‑soaked, like the boxes. Djinana hastened to show Tano through into the bedroom, to save the furniture, Bren supposed–and hoped those boxes were his clothes, particularly his sweaters and middle‑weight coat.

“Would the paidhi like tea?” Maigi asked, as a thump of the outer door announced some other arrival, probably Algini. A draft fluttered the fire in the fireplace, and immediately, true to his guess, Algini came through the sititing room, equally soaked, and managed to bow in transit, difficult with two huge boxes in his arms.

Everything he owned, he thought, remembering the pile of boxes they had loaded on the train–God, how long did they propose he stay here?

“Tea,” he recalled distractedly. “Yes–” He felt chilled in spite of the fire, having come, a few hours ago, from a much more southerly and coastal climate, and having suffered a long drive over a trying road. Hot tea appealed to him, and it came to him that, in the confusion, he hadn’t had breakfast, or lunch, except a few wafers on the plane. “Is there a cheese pie, do you think?” That was usually safe, whatever the season.

“Of course, nadi. Although I should remind the paidhi that dinner is only an hour away…”

The time zones, he realized. He’d never been far enough from Mospheira to meet one. But not only was the climate colder, the time zones had to be at least two hours advanced. He wasn’t sure how his stomach agreed with that sudden piece of information, or whether he could last an hour until supper, now that he was thinking about food.

Thunder rumbled, and lightning flashed, whiting out the windows. “No pie, then,” he said, and decided life was not necessarily fast‑paced here: he might find diversion in a leisurely, lodge‑style supper. “Just the tea, please.”

But he was thinking, hearing another furious spate of rain hit the windows, God, I understand why there’s a lake here.

Supper arrived, after the tea, elegantly served in the dining room. Definitely lodge‑style cuisine, and he certainly had no complaint against the menu–the seasonal game, thank God, was different here in the highlands.

But it was a solitary supper–himself alone at the very long and silent table–at the endmost seat, so he could see the window in the sitting room, which he thought would be pleasant, but they were so high up, on the second floor, he had no view but the gray sky, which was darkening sullenly to dusk. Tano and Algini ate in their quarters, Maigi and Djinana served, and he hardly knew either set of servants well enough to make conversation. Attempts died in, Yes, nand’ paidhi, thank you, nand’ paidhi, the cook will be glad, nand’ paidhi.

Finally, though, during the second, post game‑dish soup course, Jago came, leaned her arms on the back of the nearest of the ten chairs on either side of the table, and made idle chatter with him, how did he find the accommodations, how did he find the staff?

“Wonderful,” he said. “Though I haven’t seen a phone connection. Or the wires. Is there a portable I could borrow?”

“There’s one, I believe, in the security station. But it’s raining.”

Still.

“You mean the security station is outside.”

“I fear it is. And I really don’t think it prudent to call out, nadi Bren.”

“Why?” It came out angry, and he hadn’t meant that. Jago had instantly withdrawn her elbows from the chair back and stood up straight. “Forgive me, nadi,” he said more moderately. “But I do need to reach my office on some regular basis, I urgently need to have my mail. I do hope my mail is going to get up that difficult road.”

Jago heaved a sigh and set her hands on the chair back. “Nadi Bren,” she said patiently, “while I don’t think our moving you from the capital necessarily deceived anyone, it would hardly be wise to have you phoning out. They’ll expect decoys. Let them think our flight to Malguri was exactly that.”

“Then you know something about them.”

“No. Not actually.”

He was tired, he had had the self‑restraint scared out of him, on the drive up, and no matter how much the atevi liked their courtesies and facades, he had felt the situation slipping farther and farther from his control for two days, now. He wanted something to be clear to him. He was ready to lose all patience.

Instead he said, mildly, “I know you’ve done your best. Probably you’d rather be elsewhere than here.”

Jago’s brow furrowed. “Have I given such an impression?”

God help him, he thought. “No, of course not. But I suppose you have other duties than me.”

“No.”

Jago had a habit of doing that to conversations, he decided, once you inquired about anything useful, anything you really wanted to know. He took a spoonful of soup, hoping Jago would find something to say.

She didn’t. She leaned on the chair back, evidently at her ease.

He took another spoonful, and a third, and still Jago leaned on the chair, evidently content to watch him, or guarding him, or something. Thunder was stiil rumbling outside.

“Are you going to stay at Malguri?” he asked.

“Most likely.”

“Do you expect whoever invaded my room can reach here, too?”

“Less likely.”

It went like that, by one syllable and two, and never much more, once he’d started asking questions.

“When do you think the rain will stop?” he asked her finally, only to make Jago carry the conversation for more than three beats.

“Tomorrow,” she said. And stopped.

“Jago, do you favor me? Or am I in your disfavor?”

“Of course not, nadi Bren.”

“Have I done something for Tabini to be put out with me?”

“Not that I know.”

“Are they sending my mail?”

“Banichi’s asking about that. It takes authorizations.”

“Whose?”

“We’re working on it.”

Thunder rolled above the fortress. He finished his supper, intermittent with question and answer with Jago, had a drink or two in which Jago did not share, and even wished, if, as Banichi had said, Jago found him in the least attractive, she would stay in his sitting room and at least make some polite pass at him, if it meant she initiated four consecutive sentences. He just wanted someone to talk to.

But Jago left, all business, seeming preoccupied. The servants cleared supper away in silence.

He cast about for what to do with himself, and thought about a resumption of his regular habits, watching the evening news… which, now that he thought about it, he had no television to receive.

He didn’t ask the servants about the matter. He opened cabinets and armoires, and finally made the entire circuit of the apartments, looking for nothing more basic now than a power tap.

Not one. Not a hint of accommodation for television or telephones.

Or computer recharges.

He thought about ringing the bell, rousing the servants and demanding an extension cord, at least, so he could use his almost depleted computer tonight, if they had to run the cord up from the kitchens or via an adapter, which had to exist in some electronics store in this benighted district, down from an electric light socket.

But Banichi hadn’t put in an appearance since they parted company downstairs, Jago had refused the request for a phone already, and after pacing the carpeted wooden floors awhile and investigating the small library for something to do, he went to bed in disgust–flung himself into the curtained bed among the skins of dead animals and discovered that one, there was no reading light, two, the lights were all controlled from a switch at the doorway; and, three, a dead and angry beast was staring straight at him, from the opposite wall.

It wasn’t me, he thought at it. It wasn’t my fault. I probably wasn’t born when you died.

My species probably hadn’t left the homeworld yet.

It’s not my fault, beast. We’re both stuck here.

IV

« ^ »

M orning dawned through a rain‑spattered glass, and breakfast didn’t arrive automatically. He pulled the chain to call for it, delivered his request to Maigi, who was at least prompt to appear, and had Djinana light the fire for an after‑breakfast bath.

Then there was the “accommodation” question; and, faced with trekking downstairs before breakfast in search of a modern bathroom, he opted for privacy and for coping with what evidently worked, in its fashion, which required no embarrassed questions and no (diplomatically speaking) appearance of despising what was–with effort–an elegant, historic hospitality. He managed. He decided that, left alone, he could get used to it.

The paidhi’s job, he thought, was to adapt. Somehow.

Breakfast, God, was four courses. He saw his waistline doubling before his eyes and ordered a simple poached fish and piece of fruit for lunch, then shooed the servants out and took his leisurely bath, thoroughly self‑indulgent. Life in Malguri was of necessity a matter of planning ahead, not just turning a tap. But the water was hot.

He didn’t ask Tano and Algini in for their non‑conversation while he bathed (“Yes, nadi, no, nadi.”) or their help in dressing. He found no actual purpose for dressing: no agenda, nowhere to go until lunch, so far as Banichi and Jago had advised him.

So he wrapped himself in his dressing gown and stared out the study window at a grayness in which the blue and amber glass edging was the only color. The lake was silver gray, set in dark gray bluffs and fog. The sky was milky gray, portending more rain. A last few drops jeweled the glass.

It was exotic. It damned sure wasn’t Shejidan. It wasn’t Mospheira, it wasn’t human, and it wasn’t so far as he could see any safer than Tabini’s own household, just less convenient. Without a plug‑in for his computer.

Maybe the assassin wouldn’t spend a plane ticket on him.

Maybe boredom would send the rascal back to livelier climes.

Maybe after a week of this splendid luxury he would hike to the train station and join the assassin in an escape himself.

Fancies, all.

He took the guest book from its shelf–anything to occupy his mind–took it back to the window where there was better light and leafed through it, looking at the names, realizing–as the leaves were added forward, rather than the reverse, after the habit of atevi books–that he was holding an antiquity that went back seven hundred years, at least; and that most of the occupants of these rooms had been aijiin, or the in‑laws of aijiin, some of them well‑known in history, like Pagioni, like Dagina, who’d signed the Controlled Resources Development Treaty with Mospheira–a canny, hard‑headed fellow, who, thank God, had knocked heads together and eliminated a few highly dangerous, warlike obstacles in ways humans couldn’t.

He was truly impressed. He opened it from the back, as atevi read–the right‑left direction, and down–and discovered the foundation date of the first fortress on the site, as the van driver had said, was indeed an incredible two thousand years ago. Built of native stone, to hold the valuable water resource of Maidingi for the lowlands, and to prevent the constant raiding of hill tribes on the villages of the plain. The second, expanded, fortress–one supposed, including these very walls–dated from the sixty‑first century.

He leafed through changes and additions, found a tour schedule, of all things, once monthly, confined to the lower hall– (We ask our guests to ignore this monthly visit, which the aiji feels necessary and proper, as Malguri represents a treasure belonging to the people of the provinces. Should a guest wish to receive tour groups in formal or informal audience, please inform the staff and they will be most happy to make all arrangements. Certain guests have indeed done so, to the delight and honor of the visitors…)

Shock hell out of them, I would, Bren thought glumly. Send children screaming for their parents. None of the people here have seen a human face‑to‑face.

Too much television, Banichi would say. Children in Shejidan had to be reassured about Mospheira, that humans weren’t going to leave there and turn up in their houses at night–so the report went. Atevi children knew about assassins. From television they knew about the War of the Landing. And the space station the world hadn’t asked to have. Which was going to swoop down and destroy the earth.

His predecessor twice removed had tried to arrange to let humans tour the outlying towns. Several mayors had backed the idea. One had died for it.

Paranoia still might run that deep–in the outlying districts–and he had no wish to push it, not now, not at this critical juncture, with one attempt already on his life. Lie low and lie quiet, was the role Tabini had assigned him, in sending him here. And he still, dammit, didn’t know what else he could have done wiser than he had, once the opportunity had passed to have made a phone call to Mospheira.

If there’d ever been such an opportunity.

Human pilots, in alternation with atevi crews, flew cargo from Mospheira to Shejidan, and to several coastal towns and back again… that was the freedom humans had now, when their forebears had flown between stars none of them remembered.

Now the paidhi would be arrested, most likely, if he took a walk to town after an extension cord. His appearance could start riots, economic panics, rumors of descending space stations and death rays.

He was depressed, to tell the truth. He had thought he had a good rapport with Tabini, he had thought , in his human way of needing such things, that Tabini was as close to a friend as an ateva was capable of being.

Something was damned well wrong. At least wrong enough that Tabini couldn’t confide it to him. That was what everything added up to–either officially or personally. And he put the codex back on the shelf and took to pacing the floor, not that he intended to, but he found himself doing it, back and forth, back and forth, to the bedroom and back, and out to the sitting room, where the view of the lake at least afforded a ray of sunlight through the clouds. It struck brilliant silver on the water.

It was a beautiful lake. It was a glorious view, when it wasn’t gray.

He could be inspired, if his breakfast wasn’t lying like lead on his stomach.

Hell if he wanted to go on being patient. The paidhi’s job might demand it. The paidhi’s job might be to sit still and figure out how to keep the peace, and maybe he hadn’t done that very well by discharging firearms in the aiji’s household. But…

He hadn’t looked for the gun. He hadn’t even thought about it. Tano and Algini and Jago had done the actual packing and unpacking of his belongings.

He blazed a straight course back to the bedroom, got down on his knees and felt under the mattress.

His fingers met hard metal. Two pieces of hard metal, one a gun and one a clip of shells.

He pulled them out, sitting on the floor as he was, in his dressing robe, with the gun in his hands and a sudden dread of someone walking in on him. He shoved the gun and the clip back where they belonged, and sat there asking himself–what in hell is this about?

Nothing but that the paidhi’s in cold storage. And armed. And guarded. And his guards won’t tell him a cursed thing.

Well, damn , he thought.

And gathered himself up off the floor in a sudden fit of resolution, intending to push it as far as he had latitude and find out where the boundaries (however nebulous) might be. He went to the armoire and pulled out a good pair of pants; a sweater, obstinately human and impossible for atevi to judge for status statements; and his good brown hunting boots, that being the style of this country house.

His favorite casual coat, the leather one.

Then he walked out the impressive front doors of his suite and down the hall, an easy, idle stroll, down the stairs to the stone‑floored main floor, making no attempt whatsoever at stealth, and along the hall to the grand central room, where a fire burned wastefully in the hearth, where the lights were all candles, and the massive front doors were shut.

He walked about, idly examined the bric‑a‑brac, and objects on tables that might be functional and might be purely decorative–he didn’t know. He didn’t know what to call a good many of the objects on the walls, particularly the lethal ones. He didn’t recognize the odder heads and hides–he determined to find out the species and the status of those species, and add them to the data files for Mospheira, with illustrations, if he could get a book… or a copy machine…

… or plug in the computer.

His frustration hit new levels, at the latter thoughts. He thought about trying the front doors to see if they were locked, taking a walk out in the front courtyard, if they weren’t–maybe having a close up look at the cannon, and maybe at the gates and the road.

Then he decided that that was probably pushing Banichi’s good humor much too far; possibly, too, and more to the point, risking Banichi’s carefully laid security arrangements… which might catch him instead of an assassin.

So he opted to take a stroll back into the rest of the building instead, down an ornate corridor, and into plain ones, past doors he didn’t venture to open. If assassins might venture in here looking for him, especially in the dark, he wanted a mental map of the halls and the rooms and the stairways that might become escape routes.

He located the kitchens. And the storerooms.

And a hall at a right angle, which offered slit windows and a view out toward the mountains. He took that turn, having discovered, he supposed, the outside wall, and he walked the long corridor to the end, where he found a choice: one hallway tending off to the left and another to the right.

The left must be another wing of the building, he decided, and, seeing double doors down that direction, and those doors shut, he had a sudden chilling thought of personal residence areas, wires, and security systems.

He reasoned then that the more prudent direction for him to take, if he had come to private apartments of some sort, where security arrangements might be far more modern than the lighting, was back toward the front of the building, boxing the square toward the front hall and the foyer.

The hall he walked was going that direction, at about the right distance of separation, he was increasingly confident, to end up as the corridor that exited near the stairs leading up to his floor. He walked past one more side hall and a left‑right‑straight‑ahead choice, and, indeed, ended in the archway entry to the grand hall in front of the lain doors, where the fireplace was.

Fairly good navigation, he thought, and walked back to the warmth of the fireplace, where he had started his exploration of the back halls.

“Well,” someone said, close behind him.

He had thought the fireside unoccupied. He turned in alarm to see a wizened little ateva, with white in her black hair, sitting in one of the high‑backed leather chairs… diminutive woman–for her kind.

“Well?” she said again, and snapped her book closed. “You’re Bren. Yes?”

“You’re…” He struggled with titles and politics–different honorifics, when one was face to face with an atevi lord. “The esteemed aiji‑dowager.”

“Esteemed, hell. Tell that to the hasdrawad.” She beckoned with a thin, wrinkled hand. “Come here.”

He moved without even thinking to move. That was the command in Ilisidi. Her finger indicated the spot in front of her chair, and he moved there and stood while she looked him up and down, with pale yellow eyes that had to be a family trait. They made the recipient of that stare think of everything he’d done in the last thirty hours.

“Puny sort,” she said.

People didn’t cross the dowager. That was well reputed.

“Not for my species, nand’ dowager.”

“Machines to open doors. Machines to climb stairs. Small wonder.”

“Machines to fly. Machines to fly between stars.” Maybe she reminded him of Tabini. He was suddenly over the edge of courtesy between strangers. He had forgotten the honorifics and argued with her. He found no way back from his position. Tabini would never respect a retreat. Neither would Ilisidi, he was convinced of that in the instant he saw the tightening of the jaw, the spark of fire in the eyes that were Tabini’s own.

“And you let us have what suits our backward selves.”

Gave him back the direct retort, indeed. He bowed.

“I recall you won the War, nand’ dowager.”

“ Did we?”

Those yellow, pale eyes were quick, the wrinkles around her mouth all said decisiveness. She shot at him. He shot back,

“Tabini‑aiji also says it’s questionable. We argue.”

“Sit down!”

It was progress, of a kind. He bowed, and drew up the convenient footstool rather than fuss with a chair, which he didn’t think would further his case with the old lady.

“I’m dying,” Ilisidi snapped. “Do you know that?”

“Everyone is dying, nand’ dowager. I know that.”

Yellow eyes still held his, cruel and cold, and the aiji‑dowager’s mouth drew down at the corners. “Impudent whelp.”

“Respectful, nand’ dowager, of one who has survived.”

The flesh at the corner of the eyes crinkled. The chin lifted, stern and square. “Cheap philosophy.”

“Not for your enemies, nand’ dowager.”

“How is my grandson’s health?”

Almost she shook him. Almost. “As well as it deserves to be, nand’ dowager.”

“How well does it deserve to be?” She seized the cane beside her chair in a knobby hand and banged the ferule against the floor, once, twice, three times. “Damn you!” she shouted at no one in particular. “ Where’s the tea ?”

The conversation was over, evidently. He was glad to find it was her servants who had trespassed her good will. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he began to say, and began to get up.

The cane hammered the stones. She swung her scowl on him. “Sit down!”

“I beg the dowager’s pardon, I–” Have a pressing engagement, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. In this place the lie was impossible.

Bang! went the cane. Bang! “Damnable layabouts! Cenedi! The tea!”

Was she sane? he asked himself. He sat. He didn’t know what else he could do, but sit. He wasn’t even sure there were servants, or that tea had been in the equation until it crossed her mind, but he supposed the aiji‑dowager’s personal staff knew what to do with her.

Old staffers, Jago had said. Dangerous, Banichi had hinted.

Bang! Bang! “Cenedi! Do you hear me?”

Cenedi might be twenty years dead for all he knew. He sat frozen like a child on a footstool, arms about his knees, ready to defend his head and shoulders if Ilisidi’s whim turned the cane on him.

But to his relief, someone did show up, an atevi servant he took at first glance for Banichi, but it clearly wasn’t, on the second look. The same black uniform. But the face was lined with time and the hair was streaked liberally with gray,

“Two cups,” Ilisidi snapped.

“Easily, nand’ dowager,” the servant said.

Cenedi, Bren supposed, and he didn’t want tea, he had had his breakfast, all four courses of it. He was anxious to escape Ilisidi’s company and her hostile questions before he said or did something to cause trouble for Banichi, wherever Banichi was.

Or for Tabini.

If Tabini’s grandmother was, as she claimed, dying… she was possibly out of reasons to be patient with the world, which in Ilisidi’s declared opinion, had not done wisely to pass over her. This could be a dangerous and angry woman.

But a tea service regularly had six cups, and Cenedi set one filled cup in the dowager’s hand, and offered another to him, a cup which clearly he was to drink, and for a moment he could hear what wise atevi adults told every toddling child, don’t take, don’t touch, don’t talk with strangers–

Ilisidi took a delicate sip, and her implacable stare was on him. She was amused, he was sure. Perhaps she thought him a fool that he didn’t set down the cup at once and run for Banichi’s advice, or that he’d gotten himself this far in over his head, arguing with a woman no few atevi feared, and not for her insanity.

He took the sip. He found no other choice but abject flight, and that wasn’t the course the paidhi ever had open to him. He stared Ilisidi in the eyes when he did drink, and when he didn’t feel any strangeness from the cup or the tea, he took a second sip.

A web of wrinkles tightened about Ilisidi’s eyelids as she drank. He couldn’t see her mouth behind her hand and the cup, and when she lowered that cup, the web had all relaxed, leaving only the unrealized map of her years and her intentions, a maze of lines in the firelit black gloss of her skin.

“So what vices does the paidhi have in his spare time? Gambling? Sex with the servants?”

“It’s the paidhi’s business to be circumspect.”

“And celibate?”

It wasn’t a polite question. Nor politely meant, he feared. “Mospheira is an easy flight away, nand’ dowager. When I have the time to go home, I do. The last time…” He didn’t feel invited to chatter. But he preferred it to Ilisidi’s interrogation. “… was the 28th Madara.”

“So.” Another sip of tea. A flick of long, thin fingers. “Doubtless a tale of perversions.”

“I paid respects to my mother and brother.”

“And your father?”

A more difficult question. “Estranged.”

“On an island?”

“The aiji‑dowager may know, we don’t pursue blood‑feud. Only law.”

“A cold‑blooded lot.”

“Historically, we practiced feud.”

“Ah. And is this another thing your great wisdom found unwise?”

He sensed, perhaps, the core of her resentments. He wasn’t sure. But he had trod that minefield before–it was known territory, and he looked her straight in the face. “The paidhi’s job is to advise. If the aiji rejects our advice…”

“You wait,” she finished for him, “for another aiji, another paidhi. But you expect to get your way.”

No one had ever put it so bluntly to him. He had wondered if the atevi did understand, though he had thought they had.

“Situations change, nand’ dowager.”

“Your tea’s getting cold.” He sipped it. It was indeed cold, quickly chilled, in the small cups. He wondered if she knew what had brought him to Malguri. He had had the image of an old woman out of touch with the world, and now he thought not. He emptied the cup.

Ilisidi emptied hers, and flung it at the fire. Porcelain shattered. He jumped–shaken by the violence, asking himself again if Ilisidi was mad.

“I never favored that tea service,” Ilisidi said.

He had the momentary impulse to send his cup after it. If Tabini had said the like, Tabini would have been testing him, and he would have thrown it. But he didn’t know Ilisidi. He had to take that into account for good and all. He rose and handed his cup to Cenedi, who waited with the tray.

Cenedi hurled the whole set at the fireplace. Tea hissed in the coals. Porcelain lay shattered.

Bren bowed, as if he had received a compliment, and saw an old woman who, dying, sitting in the midst of this prized antiquity, destroyed what offended her preferences, broke what was ancient and priceless, because she didn’t like it. He looked for escape, murmured, “I thank the aiji‑dowager for her attention,” and got two steps away before bang ! went the cane on the stones, and he stopped and faced back again, constrained by atevi custom–and the suspicion what service Cenedi was to her.

He had amused the aiji‑dowager. She was grinning, laughing with a humor that shook her thin body, as she leaned both hands on the cane. “Run,” she said. “Run, nand’ paidhi. But where’s safe? Do you know?”

“This place,” he shot back. One didn’t retreat from direct challenges–not if one wasn’t a child, and wasn’t anyone’s servant. “Your residence. The aiji thought so.”

She didn’t say a thing, just grinned and laughed and rocked back and forth on the pivot of the cane. After an anxious moment he decided he was dismissed, and bowed, and headed away, hoping she was through with jokes, and asking himself was Ilisidi sane, or had Tabini known, or why had she destroyed the tea service?

Because a human had profaned it?

Or because there was something in the tea, that now was vapor on the winds above the chimney? His stomach was upset. He told himself it was suggestion. He reminded himself there were some teas humans shouldn’t drink.

His pulse was hammering as he walked the hall and climbed the stairs, and he wondered if he should try to throw up, or where, or if he could get to his own bathroom to do it… not to upset the staff… or lose his dignity…

Which was stupid, if he was poisoned. Possibly it was fear that was making his heart race. Possibly it was one of those stimulants like midarga, which in overdoses could put a human in the emergency room, and he should find Banichi or Jago and tell them what he’d done, and what he’d drunk, that was already making its way into his bloodstream.

A clammy sweat was on his skin as he reached the upper hall. It might be nothing more than fear, and suggestion, but he couldn’t get air enough, and there was a darkening around the edges of his vision. The hall became a nightmare, echoing with his steps on the wooden floor. He put out a hand to the wall to steady himself and his hand vanished into a strange dark nowhere at the side of his vision.

I’m in serious trouble, he thought. I have to get to the door. I mustn’t fall in the hallway. I mustn’t make it obvious I’m reacting to the stuff… never show fear, never show discomfort…

The door wobbled closer and larger in the midst of the dark tunnel. He had a blurred view of the latch, pushed down on it. The door opened and let him into the blinding glare of the windows, white as molten metal.

Close the door, he thought. Lock it. I’m going to bed. I might fall asleep awhile. Can’t sleep with the door unlocked.

The latch caught. He was sure of that. He faced the glare of the windows, staggered a few steps and then found he was going the wrong way, into the light.

“Nadi Bren!”

He swung around, frightened by the echoing sound, frightened by the darkness that loomed up on every side of him, around the edges and now in the center of his vision, darkness that reached out arms and caught him and swept him off his feet in a whirling of all his concept of up and down.

Then it was white, white, until the vision went gray again and violent, and he was bent over a stone edge, with someone shouting orders that echoed in his ears, and peeling his sweater off over his head.

Water blasted the back of his head, then, cold water, a battering flood that rattled his brain in his skull. He sucked in an involuntary, watery gasp of air, and tried to fight against drowning, but an iron grip held his arms and another–whoever it was had too many hands–gripped the back of his neck and kept him where he was. If he tried to turn his head, he choked. If he stayed where he was, head down to the torrent, he could breathe, between spasms of a gut that couldn’t get rid of any more than it had.

A pain stung his arm. Someone had stuck him and he was bleeding, or his arm was swelling, and whoever was holding him was still bent on drowning him. Waves of nausea rolled through his gut, he could feel the burning of tides in his blood that didn’t have anything to do with this world’s moons. They weren’t human, the things that surrounded him and constrained him, and they didn’t like him–even at best, atevi wished humanity had never been, never come here… there’d been so much blood, holding on to Mospheira, and they were guilty, but what else could they have done?

He began to chill. The cold of the water went deeper and deeper into his skull, until the dark began to go away, and he could see the gray stone, and the water in the tub, and feel the grip on his neck and his arms as painful. His knees hurt, on the stones. His arms were numb.

And his head began to feel light and strange. Is this dying? he wondered. Am I dying? Banichi’s going to be mad if that’s the case.

“Cut the water,” Banichi said, and of a sudden Bren found himself hauled over onto his back, dumped into what he vaguely decided was a lap, and felt a blanket, a very welcome but inadequate blanket, thrown over his chilled skin. Sight came and went. He thought it was a yellow blanket, he didn’t know why it mattered. He was scared as someone picked him up like a child and carried him, that that person was going to try to carry him down the stairs, which were somewhere about, the last he remembered. He didn’t feel at all secure, being carried.

The arms gave way and dumped him.

He yelled. His back and shoulders hit a mattress, and the rest of him followed.

Then someone rolled him roughly onto his face on silken, skidding furs, and pulled off his blanket, his boots and his trousers, while he just lay there, paralyzed, aware of all of it, but aware too of a pain in his temples that forecast a very bad headache. He heard Banichi’s voice out of the general murmur in the room, so it was all right now. It would be all right, since Banichi was here. He said, to help Banichi,

“I drank the tea.”

A blow exploded across his ear. “Fool!” Banichi said, from above him, and flung him over onto his back and covered him with furs.

It didn’t help the headache, which was rising at a rate that scared him and made his heart race. He thought of stroke, or aneurism, or an impending heart attack. Only where Banichi had hit his ear was hot and halfway numb. Banichi grabbed his arm and stuck him with a needle–it hurt, but not near the pain his head was beginning to have.

After that, he just wanted to lie there submerged in dead animal skins, and breathe. He listened to his own heartbeat, he timed his breaths, he found troughs between the waves of pain, and lived in those, while his eyes ran tears from the daylight and he wished he was sane enough to tell Banichi to draw the drapes.

“This isn’t Shejidan!” Banichi railed at him. “Things don’t come in plastic packages!”

He knew that. He wasn’t stupid. He remembered where he was, though he wasn’t sure what plastic packages had to do with anything. The headache reached a point he thought he was going to die and he wanted to have it over with–

But you didn’t say that to atevi, who didn’t think the same as humans, and Banichi was already mad at him.

Justifiably. This was the second time in a week Banichi had had to rescue him. He kept asking himself had the aiji‑dowager tried to kill him, and tried to warn Banichi that Cenedi was an assassin–he was sure he was. He looked like Banichi–he wasn’t sure that was a compelling logic, but he tried to structure his arguments so Banichi wouldn’t think he was a total fool.

“Cenedi did this?”

He thought he’d said so. He wasn’t sure. His head hurt too much. He just wanted to lie there in the warm furs and go to sleep and not have it hurt when and if he woke up, but he was scared to let go, because he might never wake up and he hadn’t called Hanks.

Banichi crossed the room and talked to someone. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it was Jago. He hoped there wasn’t going to be trouble, and that they weren’t under attack of some kind. He wished he could follow what they were saying.

He shut his eyes. The light hurt them too much. Someone asked if he was all right, and he decided if he weren’t all right, Banichi would call doctors or something, so he nodded that he was, and slid off into the dark, thinking maybe he had called Hanks, or maybe just thought about calling Hanks. He wasn’t sure.

V

« ^ »

L ight hurt. Moving hurt. There wasn’t any part of him that didn’t hurt once he tried to move, particularly his head, and the smell of food wasn’t at all attractive. But a second shake came at his shoulder, and Tano leaned over him, he was sure it was Tano, though his eyes wouldn’t focus, quite, and light hurt.

“You’d better eat, nand’ paidhi.”

“God.”

“Come on.” Pitilessly, Tano began plumping up the cushions about his head and shoulders–which made his head ache and made him uncertain about his stomach.

He rested there, figuring that for enough cooperation to satisfy his tormentors, and saw Algini in the doorway to the bath and the servants’ quarters, talking to Jago, the two of them speaking very quietly, in voices that echoed and distorted. Tano came back with a bowl of soup and some meal wafers. “Eat,” Tano told him, and he didn’t want it. He wanted to tell Tano go away, but his servants didn’t go away, Tabini hired them, and he had to do what they said.

Besides, white wafers was what you ate when your stomach was upset and you wanted not to be sick–he flashed on Mospheira, on his own bedroom, and his mother–but it was Tano holding his head, Tano insisting he have at least half of it, and he nibbled a crumb at a time, while the room and everything tilted on him, and kept trying to slide off into the echoing edges of the world.

He rested his eyes after that, and waked to the smell of soup. He didn’t want it, but he took a sip of it, when Tano put the cup to his lips, and burned his mouth. It tasted like the tea. He wanted to stop right there, but Tano kept trying to feed it to him, insisting he had to, that it was the only way to flush the tea out of his system. So he put an arm into the cold air, located the cup handle with his own hand, let Tano prop his head with pillows, and drank at the cup without dropping it, until his stomach decided it absolutely couldn’t tolerate any more.

He rested the cup in both hands, then, exhausted, unable to decide whether he wanted to put his arm back under the covers to get warm or whether the heat from the porcelain was better. Stay where he was, he thought. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to do anything but breathe.

Then Banichi walked in, dismissed Tano and stood over his bed with arms folded.

“How are you feeling, nand’ paidhi?”

“Very foolish,” he muttered. He remembered, if he was not hallucinating, the aiji‑dowager, a pot of tea, smashed in the fireplace. And a man, Banichi’s very image.

Who was standing in the doorway.

His heart jumped.

Cenedi walked in when he saw him looking his way, and stood on the other side of his bed.

“I wish to apologize,” Cenedi said. “Professionally, nand’ paidhi. I should have known about the tea.”

“I should have known. I will know, after this.” The taste of the tea was still in his mouth. His head ached if he blinked. He was upset that Banichi allowed this stranger into the room, and he asked himself whether Banichi was playing some angle he didn’t understand, pretending to believe Cenedi. It only made sense to keep his answers moderate, and to be polite, and not to offend anyone unnecessarily.

“They compound the aiji‑dowager’s tea,” Banichi said, “from a very old local recipe. There’s a strong stimulant involved, which the dowager considers healthful, or at least bracing. With humans’ small body weight and adverse reaction to alkaloids–”

“God.”

“The compound is a tea called dajdi, which I counsel you to avoid in future.”

“The cook requests assurances of your good will,” Cenedi said from the other side of his bed. “He had no idea a human would be in the company.”

“Assure him, please.” His head was going in circles. He lay back against the pillow, and almost spilled the half cup of soup. “No ill will. My damn fault.”

“These are human manners,” Banichi said. “He wishes to emphasize his confidence it was an accident, nadi.”

There was silence. He knew he hadn’t said what he hoped to have said, and he shouldn’t swear doing it, but his head hurt too much. “No wish to offend,” he murmured, which was the universal way out of confusing offenses. “Only good will.” His head was beginning to hurt again. Banichi rescued the soup and set it aside with a clank on the table that sounded like thunder.

“The aiji‑dowager wants her doctor to examine the paidhi,” Cenedi said, “if you would stand by as a witness for both sides in this affair, Banichi‑ji.”

“Thank the aiji‑dowager,” Banichi said. “Yes.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Bren said. He didn’t want to have the dowager’s doctor near him. He only wanted a little while to rest, lie in the pillows, and let the soup settle.

But no one paid any attention to his wishes. Cenedi went out with Jago, came back with an elderly ateva with a bag full of equipment, who threw back the warm furs, exposed his skin to chill, listened to his heart, looked into his eyes, took his pulse, and discussed with Banichi what he’d been given, how many cups of tea he’d had… “One,” he insisted, but no one listened to the victim.

Finally the doctor came and stared down at him like a specimen in a collection, asked if he had a residual taste in his mouth, or smelled something like tea, and residual taste did describe it.

“Milk,” the doctor said, “a glass every three hours. Warm or cold.”

“Cold,” he said, shuddering.

When it came, it was heated, it tasted of the tea, and he complained of it; but Banichi tasted it, swore it was only the taste in his mouth and said that when it went away it would tell him he was free of the substance.

Meanwhile Algini, the one without a sense of humor, kept bringing him fruit juice and insisting he drink, until he had to make repeated trips to what Maigi termed, delicately, the accommodation.

And meanwhile Banichi disappeared, again, and Algini didn’t know a thing about his mail, couldn’t authorize a power outlet…

“This is an historical monument, nand’ paidhi. It’s my understanding that any change to these walls has to be submitted to the Preservation Commission. We can’t even remove a hanging picture to put up our schedule board, on the very same pins.”

It didn’t sound encouraging.

“What are my chances,” he asked, “of going back to the City any time soon?”

“I can certainly present your request, nand’ paidhi. I have to say, I don’t think so. I’m sure the same considerations that brought you here, still apply.”

“What considerations?”

“The protection of your life, nand’ paidhi.”

“It doesn’t seem safe here, does it?”

“We’ve warned the kitchen to ask if you’re in any party it serves. The cook is extremely concerned. He assures you of his caution in the future.”

He sulked, childlike, and, feeling Algini’s frustration, struggled to mend his expression–but he felt like a child, hemmed about, decided for, and talked past by towering people with motives too dark and hushed to share with him. It inspired him to do childish things, like sending Algini for something complicated so he could sneak downstairs and out the front door and down the road to town.

But he sat still in bed like a good adult, and tried not to be surly with the staff, and drink the damned milk–“Cold!” he insisted to Algini, deciding he couldn’t manage the rest of it.

Whereupon the kitchen, evidently never having heard of such a procedure, sent it over ice.

The milk at last stopped tasting of the tea, the fruit juice had run through him until he had fruit juice running in his veins, he said as much to Djinana, who thought that was exceptionally, originally funny.

He didn’t. He asked for books on Maidingi, read about Malguri castle, out of books liberal in color pictures of his apartments, with notes on what century which piece dated from.

The bed, for instance, was seven hundred years old. There were tours into this section of the castle, if there happened to be no guest in residence. He imagined tourists walking through, children gazing fearfully at the bed, and the guide talking about the paidhi, who’d died in Malguri castle, said to walk the halls at night, haunting the kitchens, looking for a cup of tea…

But it was all history that humans hadn’t had access to–he knew: he’d read every writing of his predecessors. He wanted to make a note, to request Annals of Maidingi by Tagisi of Maidingi township, of Polgini clan, Carditi‑Aigorana house, for the paidhiin’s permanent research library in Mospheira… and then remembered the power outlet that it wasn’t possible to have. And nobody, of course, could remove an historic damned lightbulb to put in a tap. It might pull down the historic damned wiring right off its track across the historic wooden rafters.

Solar recharger, he thought. He wondered if the nearby town had any such thing compatible with his computer, and if he could charge his account via the local bank–certainly Banichi could.

Meanwhile… paper and pen. He got up and searched the desks in the study, and found paper. No pen. He searched for the one he’d used to sign the guest register. Gone.

Maddening. He rang for the servants, told Djinana he wanted one immediately, and got the requisite pen from the servants’ quarters. It skipped and it spat, but it wrote; and he wrapped himself in a warm robe, put stockings on his cold feet, and sat and wrote morbid notes to his successor.

… If , he added glumly, this ever gets to human eyes. I’ve a gun under my mattress. Whom shall I shoot? Algini, who can’t get his schedule board hung? Cenedi, who probably didn’t have a clue about the tea being lethal to humans ?

Tabini‑aiji sent me here for my protection. So far, I’ve come far nearer dying at the hands of Malguri’s kitchen than Shejidan’s assassins…

Some things he didn’t write, fearing his room wasn’t immune to search, if only by the servants and his own security, who were probably one and the same–but he asked himself about the aiji‑dowager, and asked himself twice what Tabini had had on his mind with that throw‑away comment, “Grandmother’s in residence.”

Not in the least likely, of course, that Tabini had foreseen his invitation to a fatal tea: even for the aiji‑dowager, it was too serendipitous and too strange, over all–even if one grew extremely suspicious when accidents happened in the presence of persons of twice‑denied ambition.

The obvious thought, of course, was that Ilisidi didn’t like humans.

But what if–a poisoned, delirious brain could form very strange ideas–what if Tabini’s sending him here hadn’t been to send him here, but to get Banichi and Jago inside Malguri, past Ilisidi’s guard?

A try on Ilisidi?

Thinking about it made his head hurt.

His appetite was still off, at supper. He didn’t feel up to formal dinner, and ordered simply a bowl of soup and wafers–which tasted better than they had yesterday, and he decided he felt up to a second bowl of it, in his televisionless, fellowless, phoneless exile.

Mealtimes had become a marker in the day, which thus far, lacking even a clock, he measured in paces of his quarters, in pages turned, in the slow progress of clouds across the sky, or boats across the wind‑wrinkled lake.

He forced himself to drink an ordinary tea, and lingered over a sweet milk pudding, in which there was only one questionable and lumpy substance, exceedingly bitter to the taste–but one could, with dexterity, pick the bits out.

Food became an amusement, a hobby, an adventure despite cook’s assurances. The book he had open beside his plate was an absorbing enough account of lingering and resentful spirits of Malguri’s murdered and accident‑prone dead. The lake also was given to be haunted by various restless fishermen and by one ill‑fated lord of Malguri who leapt in full armor from the cliffs, thus evading what the book called ‘a shameful marriage.’

Curious idea. He resolved to ask someone about that, and to find out the doubtless prurient details.

He discarded the last bitter bit in the pudding, and had his final spoonful as Djinana came in, to take the dishes, as he supposed.

“I’ll have another cup of tea,” he said. He was feeling much better. Djinana laid a tiny silver scroll‑case, with great ceremony, beside his plate.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“I don’t know, nand’ paidhi. Nadi Cenedi conveyed it.”

“Would you open it?”

“It’s the dowager’s own…” Djinana protested.

“Nadi. Would you open it?”

Djinana frowned and took it up–broke the seal and spread out the paper.

He took it, once Djinana had proven it only the scroll it seemed to be. But he was thinking of the Bu‑javid post office, and Jago’s comment about needles in the mail.

It was almost as welcome. An invitation. From the aiji‑dowager. For an early breakfast.

The hospitality of an aiji of any degree was not easy to refuse. He had to share a roof with this woman. She’d nearly killed him. Refusal could convey a belief it wasn’t an accident. And that could mean hostilities. “Tell Banichi I need to talk to him.”

“I’ll try, nadi.”

“What,‘try?’ Where is he, nadi?”

“I believe he and nadi Jago drove somewhere.”

“Somewhere.” He’d become reluctantly well acquainted with the vicinity, at least the historical sites within driving distance of Malguri. There wasn’t anywhere to drive to, except the airport and the town just outside. “Then I need to talk to Tano.”

“I don’t know where he is, either, nand’ paidhi. I rather thought he’d gone with your security staff.”

“Algini, then.”

“I’ll look for him, nand’ paidhi.”

“They wouldn’t have left me here.”

“I would think not, nand’ paidhi. But I assure you Maighi and I are perfectly well at your service.”

“Then what would you advise?” He handed Djinana the scroll, case and all. Djinana scanned it, and frowned.

“It’s unusual,” Djinana said. “The aiji‑dowager doesn’t receive many people.”

Fine, he thought. So she’s making an extraordinary gesture. The stakes go up.

“So what do I answer, nadi? Is it safe?”

Djinana’s face assumed a very official serenity. “I couldn’t possibly advise the paidhi.”

“Then can we find Algini? I take it there’s some urgency to respond to this.”

“A certain amount. I believe nand’ Cenedi elected to wait–”

“He knows Banichi’s not here.”

“I’m not sure, nadi.” The facade cracked. Worry did come through. “Perhaps I can find Algini.”

Djinana left on that errand. He poured himself another cup of tea. He had to answer the summons, one way or the other. The thought unworthily crossed his mind that the aiji‑dowager might indeed have waited until Banichi and Jago were otherwise occupied, although what might legitimately have drawn the whole damned staff to the airport when Tabini had said he was in their charge, he didn’t know. He carefully rolled up the little scroll, shoved it into the case, and capped it. And waited until Djinana came back, and bowed, with a worried look. “Nadi, I don’t know–”

“–where Algini is,” he said.

“I’m sorry, nand’ paidhi. I truly don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine. I’ve made inquiries in the kitchen and with nand’ Cenedi–”

“Is he still waiting?”

“Yes, nand’ paidhi, I’ve told him–you wished to consult protocols.”

Tell Cenedi he was indisposed? That might save him–if the dowager wasn’t getting her own reports from the staff.

Which he couldn’t at all guarantee.

“Nadi Djinana. If your mother had a gun, and your mother threatened me–whose side would you take?”

“I–assure you, nadi, my mother would never…”

“You’re not security. I don’t come under your man’chi .”

“No, nadi. I work for the Preservation Commission. I’m a caretaker. Of the estate, you understand.”

If there was one ateva in the world telling him the truth, he believed it by that one moment of absolute shock in Djinana’s eyes, that minute, dismayed hesitation.

He hadn’t phrased it quite right, of course, not, at least, inescapably. Banichi would have said, You’re within my duty, nand’ paidhi. And that could have meant anything.

But, caretaker of Malguri? One knew where Djinana stood. Firmly against the hanging of schedule boards and the importation of extension cords and the sticking of nails in Malguri’s walls. He knew that–but he didn’t know even that much about Banichi at the present moment. Certainly Banichi hadn’t been wholly forthcoming with him, either that, or Banichi had been damned lax–which wasn’t Banichi’s style as he knew it.

Unless something truly catastrophic had happened. Something like an attempt on Tabini himself.

That surmise upset his stomach.

Which, dammit, he didn’t need to happen to him when he had just gotten his stomach used to food again. No, Tabini wasn’t in danger. Tabini had far better security than he did; Tabini had the whole damned City to look out for him, while his staff was down at the airport, leaving him to Cenedi, who could walk in here and blow him and Djinana to small bits, if Cenedi were so inclined to disregard biichi‑ji and stain the historic carpets.

“Appropriate paper and pen.”

“With your own scroll‑case, nadi?”

“The paidhi doesn’t know where his staff put it. They don’t let him in on such matters. Try some appropriate drawer. If you don’t find it, it can go bare.–And if Banichi isn’t back by tomorrow morning, you’ll go with me.”

“I–” Djinana began a protest. And made a bow, instead. “I have some small skill at protocols. I’ll look for the scroll‑case. Or provide one from the estate. Would the paidhi wish advice in phrasing?”

“Djinana, tell me. Am I frightening? Am I so foreign? Would I give children bad dreams?”

“I–” Djinana looked twice distressed.

“Do I disturb you , nadi? I wouldn’t want to. I think you’re an honest man. And I’ve met so few.”

“I wish the paidhi every good thing.”

“You are skilled in protocol. Do you think you can get me there and back tomorrow unpoisoned?”

“Please, nand’ paidhi. I’m not qualified–”

“But you’re honest. You’re a good man. You’d defend your mother before you’d defend me. As a human, I find that very honest. You owe your mother more than you do me. As I owe mine, thank you. And in that particular, you could be human, nadi, which I don’t personally consider an outrageous thing to be.”

Djinana regarded him with a troubled frown. “I truly don’t understand your figure of speech, nadi.”

“Between Malguri, and your mother, nadi–if it were the ruin of one or the other– which would you choose?”

“That of my mother, nadi. My man’chi is with this place.”

“For Malguri’s reputation–would you die, nadi‑ji?”

“I’m not nadi‑ji. Only nadi, nand’ paidhi.”

“Would you die, nadi‑ji?”

“I would die for the stones of this place. So I would, nadi‑ji. I couldn’t abandon it.”

“We also,” he said, in a strange and angry mood, “we human folk, understand antiquities. We understand preserving. We understand the importance of old stories. Everything we own and know–is in old stories. I wish we could give you everything we know, nadi, and I wish you could give us the same, and I wish we could travel to the moon together before we’re both too old.”

“To the moon!” Djinana said, with an anxious, uncertain laughter. “What would we do there?”

“Or to the old station. It’s your inheritance , nadi‑ji. Itshould be.” The paidhi was vastly upset, he discovered, and saying things he ordinarily reserved for one man, for Tabini, things he dared not bring out in open council, because there were interests vested in suspicion of humans and of everything the paidhi did and said, as surely misguidance and deception of atevi interests.

So he told the truth to a caretaker‑servant, instead.

And was angry at Banichi, who probably, justifiably, was angry with the paidhi. But the paidhi saw things slipping away from him, and atevi he’d trusted turning strange and distant and withholding answers from him at moments of crisis they might have foreseen.

He’d puzzled Djinana, that was certain. Djinana simply gathered up the dessert dish and, when he couldn’t find the scroll‑case, brought him an antique one from the estate, and pen and paper and sealing‑wax.

He wrote, in his best hand, Accepting the aiji‑dowager’s most gracious invitation for breakfast at the first of the clock, the paidhi‑aiji, Bren Cameron, with profound respect …

It was the form–laying it on, perhaps, but not by much. And he trusted that the dowager wouldn’t have her mail censored. He passed the text by Djinana’s doubtless impeccable protocol‑sense, then sealed it with his seal‑ring and dismissed him to give it to Cenedi, who was probably growing very annoyed with waiting.

After that, with Djinana handling those courtesies, he composed another letter, to Tabini.

I am uneasy, aiji‑ma. I feel that there must be duties in the City which go wanting, as there were several matters pending. I hope that your staff will provide me necessary briefings, as I would be distressed to fall out of current with events. As you may know, Malguri is not computerized, and phone calls appear out of the question .

Please accept my warm regards for auspicious days and fortunate outcome . Baji‑naji be both in your favor. The paidhi‑aiji Bren Cameron with profound respect and devotion to the Association and to Tabini‑aiji in the continuance of his office, the…

He had to stop and count up the date on his fingers, figuring he had lost a day. Or two. He became confused–decided it was only one, then wrote it down and sealed the letter with only a ribbon seal, but with the wax directly on the paper.

That one was for Banichi to take on his next trip to the airport, and, one presumed, to the post.

Then, in the case that one never made it, he wrote a copy.

Djinana came back through the room, reporting he’d delivered the scroll, and asking would the paidhi need the wax‑jack further.

“I’ve a little correspondence to take care of,” he said to Djinana. “I’ll blow out the wick and read awhile after, thank you, nadi. I don’t think I’ll need anything. Is the dowager’s gentleman out?”

“The door is locked for the night, nand’ paidhi, yes.”

“Banichi has a key.”

“He does, yes. So does nadi Jago. But they’ll most probably use the kitchen entry.”

The kitchen entry. Of course there was one. The food arrived, not from the stairs, but from the back halls, through the servants’ quarters, his bedroom, and the sitting room, before it reached his dining table.

“I’ll be fine, then. Good night, nadi Djinana. Thank you. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

“Good night, nand’ paidhi.”

Djinana went on back to his quarters, then. He finished his paraphrase of the note, and added:

If this is found, and no note of similar wording has reached you before this, Tabini‑ji, suspect the hand that should have delivered the first message. After one poisoned cup, from the dowager, I am not reassured of anyone in Malguri, even my own staff .

He put it in the guest book, figuring that the next occupant would find it, if he didn’t remove it himself. It wasn’t a book Banichi would necessarily read.

And, as he had just written, he was far from certain of anything or anyone in Malguri. tonight.

Thunder rumbled outside, and lightning lit rain‑drops on the night‑dark window glass, flared brief color from the stained glass borders.

Bren read, late, in no mood to sleep, or to share a bed with his morbid thoughts. He looked at pictures, when the words began to challenge his focus or his acceptance of atevi attitudes. He read about old wars. Betrayals. Poisonings.

Banichi arrived on a peal of thunder, walked in and stood by the fire. A fine mist glistened on his black, silver‑trimmed uniform, and he seemed not pleased. “Nadi Bren, I wish you’d consult before decisions.”

The silence hung there. He looked at Banichi without speaking, without an expression on his face, and thought of saying, Nadi, I wish you’d consult before leaving.

But Banichi, for what he cared, could guess what he was thinking, the way he was left to guess what Banichi was thinking, or where Jago was, or why the so‑called servants they’d brought for him from the City were absent or unavailable.

And maybe it wasn’t justified that he be angry, and maybe Banichi’s business at the airport or wherever he’d just been was entirely justified and too secret to tell him, but, damn , he was angry, a peculiar, stinging kind of anger that, while Banichi was standing there, added up to a hurt he hadn’t realized he felt so keenly, a thoroughly unprofessional and foolish and human hurt, which began with Tabini and extended to the two atevi besides Tabini that he’d thought he understood.

Heaving up his insides on a regular basis probably had something to do with it. Mineral balance. Vitamins. Unaccustomed foods that could leach nutrients out of you instead of putting them in, or chemically bind what you needed… he could think of a dozen absolutely plausible excuses for calculatedly self‑destructive behavior, half of them dietary and the other half because, dammit, his own hard‑wiring or his own culture wanted to like some single one of the people he’d devoted his life to helping.

“I don’t have to be the paidhi,” he said, finally, since Banichi persisted in saying nothing. “I don’t have to leave my family and my people and live where I’m not welcome with nine tenths of the population.”

“How do they choose you?” Banichi asked.

“It’s a study. It’s something you specialize in. If you’re the best, and the paidhi quits, you take the job. That’s how. It’s something you do so there’ll be peace.”

“You’re the best at what you do.”

“I try to be,” he retorted. “I do try, Banichi. Evidently I’ve done something amiss. Possibly I’ve offended the aiji‑dowager. Possibly I’ve gotten myself into a dangerous situation. I don’t know. That’s an admission of failure, Banichi. I don’t know . But you weren’t here to ask. Jago wasn’t here. I couldn’t raise Algini. Tano wasn’t on duty. So I asked Djinana, who didn’t know what maybe you could have told me. If you’d been here.”

Banichi frowned, darkly.

“Where were you, Banichi? Or should I ask? If you intended to answer my questions, you’d have told me you were leaving, and if you didn’t intend me to worry you wouldn’t trail the evidence past me and refuse my reasonable questions, when I rely on you for protection the Treaty doesn’t let me provide for myself.”

Banichi said nothing, nor moved for the moment. Then he removed his elbow from the fireplace stonework and stalked off toward the bedroom.

Bren snapped the book shut. Banichi looked back in startlement, he had that satisfaction. Banichi’s nerves were that tightly strung.

“Where’s Jago?” Bren asked.

“Outside. Refusing your reasonable questions, too.”

“Banichi, dammit!” He stood up, little good it did–he still had to look up to Banichi’s face, even at a distance. “If I’m under arrest and confined here,–tell me. And where’s my mail? Don’t regular planes come to Maidingi? It looked like an airport to me.”

“From Shejidan, once a week. Most of the country, nadi, runs at a different speed. Be calm. Enjoy the lake. Enjoy the slower pace.”

“Slower pace? I want a solar recharge, Banichi. I want to make a phone call. Don’t tell me this place doesn’t have a telephone.”

“In point of fact, no, there isn’t a telephone. This is an historical monument. The wires would disfigure the–”

“Underground lines, Banichi. Pipes overhead. The place has plenty of wires.”

“They have to get here.”

“There’s gas. There’s light. Why aren’t there plug‑ins? Why can’t someone go down to the town, go to a hardware and get me a damned power extension and a screw‑in plug? I could sacrifice a ceiling light. The historic walls wouldn’t suffer defacement.”

“There isn’t a hardware. The town of Maidingi is a very small place, nadi Bren.”

“God.” His head was starting to hurt, acutely. His blood pressure was coming up again and he was dizzy, the light and warmth and noise of the fire all pouring into his senses as he groped after the fireplace stonework. “Banichi, why is Tabini doing this?”

“Doing what, nadi? I don’t think the aiji‑ji has a thing to do with hardwares in Maidingi.”

He wasn’t amused. He leaned his back against the stones, folded his arms and fixed Banichi with an angry stare, determined to have it put, one way or the other. “You know,‘doing what.’ I could feel better if I thought it was policy. I don’t feel better thinking it might be something I’ve done, or trouble I’ve made for Tabini–I like him, Banichi. I don’t want to be the cause of harm to him, or to you, or to Jago. It’s my man’chi . Humans are like that. We have unreasonable loyalties to people we like, and you’re going far past the surface of my politeness, Banichi.”

“Clearly.”

“And I still like you, damn you. You don’t shake one of us, you don’t fling our liking away because your man’chi says otherwise, you can’t get rid of us when we like you, Banichi, you’re stuck with me, so make the best of it.”

There wasn’t a clear word for like . It meant a preference for salad greens or iced drinks. But love was worse. Banichi would never forgive him that.

Banichi’s nostrils flared, once, twice. He said, in accented Mosphei’, “What meaning? What meaning you say, nand’ paidhi?”

“It means the feeling I have for my mother and my brother and my job, I have for Tabini and for you and for Jago.” Breath failed him. Self‑control did. He flung it all out. “Banichi, I’d walk a thousand miles to have a kind word from you. I’d give you the shirt from my back if you needed it; if you were in trouble, I’d carry you that thousand miles. What do you call that? Foolish?”

Another flaring of Banichi’s nostrils. “That would be very difficult for you.”

“So is liking atevi.” That got out before he censored it. “Baji‑naji. It’s the luck I have.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking. God , I’m not joking. We have to like somebody, we’re bound to like somebody, or we die, Banichi, we outright die. We make appointments with grandmothers, we drink the cups strangers offer us, and we don’t ask for help anymore, Banichi, what’s the damned point, when you don’t see what we need?”

“If I don’t guess what you like, you threaten to ruin my reputation. Is this accurate?”

The headache was suddenly excruciating. Things blurred. “Like, like, like–get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can’t you cross it once? Can’t you cross to where I am, Banichi, just once, to know what I think? You’re clever. I know you’re hard to mislead. Follow , Banichi, the solitary trail of my thoughts.”

“I’m not a cursed dinner‑course!”

“Banichi‑ji.” The pain reached a level and stayed there, tolerable, once he’d discovered the limits of it. He had his hand on the stonework. He felt the texture of it, the silken dust of age, the fire‑heated rock, broken from the earth to make this building before humans ever left the home‑world. Before they were ever lost, and desperate. He composed himself–he remembered he was the paidhi, the man in the middle. He remembered he’d chosen this, knowing there wouldn’t be a reward, believing, at the time, that of course atevi had feelings, and of course, once he could find the right words, hit the right button, find the clue to atevi thought–he’d win of atevi everything he was giving up among humankind.

He’d been twenty‑two, and what he’d not known had so vastly outweighed what he’d known.

“Your behavior worries me,” Banichi said.

“Forgive me.” There was a large knot interfering with his speech. But he was vastly calmer. He chose not to look at Banichi. He only imagined the suspicion and the anger on Banichi’s face. “I reacted unprofessionally and intrusively.”

“Reacted to what, nand’ paidhi?”

A betraying word choice. He was slipping, badly. The headache had upset his stomach, which was still uncertain. “I misinterpreted your behavior. The mistake was mine, not yours. Will you attend my appointment with me in the morning, and guard me from my own stupidity?”

“What behavior did you misinterpret?”

Straight back to the attack. Banichi refused the bait he cast. And he had no ability to argue, now, or to deal at all in cold rationality.

“I explained that. It didn’t make sense to you. It won’t.” He stared into the hazy corners beyond the firelight, and remembered the interpretation Banichi had put on his explanation. “It wasn’t a threat, Banichi. I would never do that. I value your presence and your good qualities. Will you go with me tomorrow?”

Back to the simplest, the earliest and most agreed‑upon words. Cold. Unfreighted.

“No, nadi. No one invites himself to the dowager’s table. You accepted.”

“You’re assigned–”

“My man’chi is to Tabini. My actions are his actions. The paidhi can’t have forgotten this simple thing.”

He was angry. He looked at Banichi, and went on looking, long enough, he hoped, for Banichi to think in what other regard his actions were Tabini’s actions. “I haven’t forgotten. How could I forget?”

Banichi returned a sullen stare. “Ask regarding the food you’re offered. Be sure the cook understands you’re in the party.”

The door in the outermost room opened. Banichi’s attention was instant and wary. But it was Jago coming through, rain‑spattered as Banichi, in evident good humor until the moment she saw the two of them. Her face went immediately impassive. She walked through to his bedroom without comment.

“Excuse me,” Banichi said darkly, and went after her.

Bren glared at his black‑uniformed back, at a briskly swinging braid–the two of Tabini’s guards on their way through his bedroom, to the servant quarters; he hit his fist against the stonework and didn’t feel the pain until he walked away from the fireside.

Stupid, he said to himself. Stupid and dangerous to have tried to explain anything to Banichi: Yes, nadi, no, nadi, clear and simple words, nadi.

Banichi and Jago had gone on to the servants’ quarters, where they lodged, separately. He went through to his own bedroom and undressed, with an eye to the dead and angry creature on the wall, the expression of its last, cornered fight.

It stared back at him, when he was in the bed. He picked up his book and read, because he was too angry to sleep, about ancient atevi battles, about treacheries and murders.

About ghost ships on the lake, and a manifestation that haunted the audience hall on this level, a ghostly beast that sometimes went snuffling up and down the corridors, looking for something or someone.

He was a modern man. They were atevi superstitions. But he took one look and then evaded the glass, glaring eyes of the beast on the wall.

Thunder banged. The lights all went out, except the fire in the next room, casting its uncertain glow, that didn’t reach all the corners of this one, and didn’t at all touch the servants’ hall.

He told himself lightning must have hit a transformer.

But the place was eerily quiet after that, except for a strange, distant thumping that sounded like a heartbeat coming through the walls.

Then far back in the servants’ hall, beyond the bath, steps moved down the corridor toward his bedroom.

He slid off the bed, onto his knees.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Jago’s voice called out. “It’s Jago.”

He withdrew his hand from beneath the mattress, and slithered up onto the bed, sitting and watching as an entire brigade of staff moved like shadows through his room and outward. He couldn’t see faces. He saw the spark of metal on what he thought was Banichi’s uniform.

One lingered.

“Who is it?” he asked, anxiously.

“Jago, nadi. I’m staying with you. Go to sleep.”

“You’re joking!”

“It’s most likely only a lightning strike, nand’ paidi. That’s the auxiliary generator you hear. It keeps the refrigeration running in the kitchen, at least until morning.”

He got up, went looking for his robe and banged his knee on a chair, making an embarrassing scrape.

“What do you want, nadi?”

“My robe.”

“Is this it?” Jago located it instantly, at the foot of his bed, and handed it to him. Atevi night vision was that much better, he reminded himself, and took not quite that much comfort from knowing it. He put the robe on, tied it about him and went into the sitting room, as less provocative, out where the fireplace provided one kind of light and a whiter, intermittent flicker of lightning came from the windows.

A padding, metal‑sparked shadow followed him. Atevi eyes reflected a pale gold. Atevi found it spooky that human eyes didn’t, that humans could slip quietly through the dark. Their differences touched each others’ nightmares.

But there was no safer company in the world, he told himself, and told himself also that the disturbance was in fact nothing but a lightning strike, and that Banichi was going to be wet, chilled, and in no good mood when he got back in.

But Jago wasn’t in her night‑robe. Jago had been in uniform and armed, and so had Banichi been, when the lights had gone.

“Don’t you sleep?” he asked her, standing before the fire.

The twin reflections of her eyes eclipsed, a blink, then vanished as she came close enough to rest an elbow against the stonework mantel. Her shadow loomed over him, and fire glistened on the blackness of her skin. “We were awake,” she said.

Business went on all around him, with no explanations. He felt chilled, despite the robe, and thought how desperately he needed his sleep–in order to deal with the dowager in the morning.

“Are there protections around this place?” he asked.

“Assuredly, nadi‑ji. This is still a fortress, when it needs to be.”

“With the tourists and all.”

“Tourists. Yes.–There is a group due tomorrow, nadi. Please be prudent. They needn’t see you.”

He felt himself more and more fragile, standing shivering in front of the fire in his night‑robe. “Do people ever… slip away from the tour, slip out of the guards’ sight?”

“There’s a severe fine for that,” Jago said.

“Probably one for killing the paidhi, too,” he muttered. His robe had no pockets. You could never convince an atevi tailor about pockets. He shoved his hands up the sleeves. “A month’s pay, at least.”

Jago thought that was funny. He heard her laugh, a rare sound. That was her reassurance.

“I’m supposed to be at breakfast with Tabini’s grandmother,” he said. “Banichi’s mad at me.”

“Why did you accept?”

“I didn’t know I could refuse. I didn’t know what trouble it would make–”

Jago made a soft, derisive sound. “Banichi said it was because you thought he was a dessert.”

He couldn’t laugh for a moment. It was too grim, and on the edge of pain; and then it was funny, Banichi’s glum perplexity, his human desperation to find a focus for his orphaned affections. Jago’s sudden, unprecedented willingness to converse.

“I take it this was confused in translation,” Jago said.

“I expressed my extreme respect for him,” he said. Which was cold, and distant, and proper. The whole futile argument loomed up, insurmountable barriers again. “Respect. Favor. It’s all one thing.”

“How?” Jago asked–a completely honest question. The atevi words didn’t mean what he tried to make them mean. They couldn’t, wouldn’t ever. The whole atevi hardwiring was different, the experts said so. The dynamics of atevi relationships were different… in ways no paidhi had ever figured out, either, possibly because paidhiin invariably tried to find words to fit into human terms–and then deceived themselves about the meanings, in self‑defense, when the atevi world grew too much for them.

God, why did she decide to talk tonight? Was it policy? An interrogation?

“Nadi,” he said wearily, “if I could say that, you’d understand us ever so much better.”

“Banichi speaks Mosphei’. You should say it to him in Mosphei’”

“Banichi doesn’t feel Mosphei’.” It was late. He was extremely foolish. He made a desperate, far‑reaching attempt to locate abstracts. “I tried to express that I would do favorable things on his behalf because he seems to me a favorable person.”

It at least threw it into the abstract realm, that perception of luck in charge of the universe, which somewhat passed for a god in Ragi thinking.

“Midei,” Jago declared in seeming surprise. It was a word he’d not heard before, and there weren’t many, in ordinary usage, that he hadn’t. “Dahemidei. You’re midedeni.”

That was three in a row. He was too tired to take notes and the damned computer was down. “What does that mean?”

“Midedeni believe luck and favor reside in people. It was a heresy, of course.”

Of course it was. “So it was a long time ago.”

“Oh, half of Adjaiwaio still believes something like that, in the country, anyway–that you’re supposed to Associate with everybody you meet.”

An entire remote Association where people liked other people? He both wanted to go there and feared there were other essential, perhaps Treaty‑threatening, differences.

“You really believe in that?” Jago pursued the matter. And it was indeed dangerous, how scattered and longing his thoughts instantly grew down that track, how difficult it was to structure logical arguments against the notion, the very seductive notion that atevi could understand affection. “The lords of technology truly think this is the case?”

Jago clearly thought intelligent people weren’t expected to think so.

Which made him question himself, in the paidhi’s internal habit, whether humans were somehow blind to the primitive character of such attachments.

Then the dislocation jerked him the other direction, back into belief humans were right. “Something like that,” he said. The experts said atevi couldn’t think outside hierarchical structure. And Jago said they could? His heart was pounding. His common sense said hold back, don’t believe it, there’s a contradiction here. “So you can feel attachment to one you don’t have man’chi for.”

“Nadi Bren,–are you making a sexual proposition to me?”

The bottom dropped out of his stomach. “I– No , Jago‑ji.”

“I wondered.”

“Forgive my impropriety.”

“Forgive my mistaken notion. What were you asking?”

“I–” Recovering objectivity was impossible. Or it had never existed. “I’d only like to read about midedeni, if you could find a book for me.”

“Certainly. But I doubt there’d be one here. Malguri’s library is mostly local history. The midedeni were all eastern.”

“I’d like a book to keep, if I could.”

“I’m sure. I have one, if nothing else, but it’s in Shejidan.”

He’d made a thorough mess. And left a person who was probably reporting directly to Tabini with the impression humans belonged to some dead heresy they probably didn’t even remotely match.

“It probably isn’t applicable,” he said, trying to patch matters. “Exact correspondence is just too unlikely.” Jago had a brain. A very quick one; and he risked something he ordinarily would have said only to Tabini. “It’s the apparent correspondences that can be the most deceptive. We want to believe them.”

“At very least, we’re polite in Shejidan. We don’t shoot people over philosophical differences. I wouldn’t take such a contract.”

God help him. He thought that was a joke out of Jago. The second for the evening. “I wouldn’t think so.”

“I hope I don’t offend you, nadi.”

“I like you, too.”

In atevi, it was very funny. It won Jago’s rare grin, a duck of the head, a flash of that eerie mirror‑luminance of her eyes, quite, quite sober.

“I haven’t understood,” she said. “It eludes me, nadi.”

The best will in the world couldn’t bridge the gap. He looked at her in a sense of isolation he hadn’t felt since his first week on the mainland, his first unintended mistake with atevi.

“But you try, Jago‑ji. Banichi tries, too. It makes me less–” There was no word for lonely. “Less single.”

“We share a man’chi ,” Jago said, as if she had understood something he was saying. “To Tabini’s house. Don’t doubt us, paidhi‑ji. We won’t desert you.”

Off the meaning again. There was nothing there, nothing to make the leap of logic. He stared at her, asking himself how someone so fundamentally honest, and kind , granted the license she had–could be so absolutely void of what it might take to make that leap of emotional need. It just didn’t click into place. And it was a mistake to pin anything on the Adjaiwaio and any dead philosophy.

Philosophy was the keyword: intellectual, not emotional structure. And a human being, having embraced it, went away empty and in pain.

He said, “Thank you, nadi‑ji,” and walked away from the fire to the window, which showed nothing but rain‑spots against the dark.

Something banged, or popped. It echoed off the walls, once, twice.

That was no loose shutter. It was off somewhere outside the walls, to the southwest, he thought, beyond the driveway.

The house seemed very still, except the rain and the sound of the fire on the hearth.

“Get away from the window,” Jago said, and he stepped back immediately, his shoulder to solid stone, his heart beating like a hammer as he expected Jago to leave him and rush off to Banichi’s aid. His imagination leapt to four and five assassins breaching the antique defenses of the castle, enemies already inside the walls.

But Jago only stood listening, as it seemed. There was no second report. Her pocket‑com beeped–he had not seen it on her person, but of course she had it; she lifted it and thumbed on to Banichi’s voice, speaking in verbal code.

“Tano shot at shadows,” she translated, glancing at him. She was a black shape against the fire. “It’s all right. He’s not licensed.”

Understandable that Tano would make a mistake in judgement, she meant. So Tano, at least, and probably Algini, was out of Tabini’s house guard–licensed for firearms, for defense, but not for their use in public places.

“So was it lightning?” he asked. “Is it lightning they’re shooting at out there?”

“Nervous fingers,” Jago said easily, and shut the com off. “Nothing at all to worry about, nadi‑ji.”

“How long until we have power?”

“As soon as the crews can get up here from Maidingi. Morning, I’d say, before we have lights. This happens, nadi. The cannon on the wall draw strikes very frequently. So, unfortunately, does the transformer. It’s not at all uncommon.”

Breakfast might be cancelled, due to the power failure. He might have a reprieve from his folly.

“I suggest you go to bed,” Jago said. “I’ll sit here and read until the rest of us come in. You’ve an appointment in the morning.”

“We were discussing man’chi ,” he said, unnerved, be it the storm or the shot or his own failures. He’d gotten far too personal with Jago, right down to her assumption he was trying to approach her for sex, God help him. He was tangling every line of communication he had, he was on an emotional jag, he felt entirely uneasy about the impression he’d left with her, an impression she was doubtless going to convey to Banichi, and both of them to Tabini: the paidhi’s behaving very oddly, they’d say. He propositioned Jago, invited Djinana to the moon, and thinks Banichi’s a dessert.

“Were we?” Jago left the fire and walked over to him, taking his arm. “Let’s walk back to your bedroom, nand’ paidhi, you’ll take a chill–” She outright snatched him past the window, bruising his arm, he so little expected it.

He walked with her, then, telling himself if she were really concerned she’d have made him crawl beneath it–she only wanted him away from a window that would glow with conspicuous light from the fire, and cast their shadows. There were the outer walls, between that window and the lake.

But was it lightning hitting the cannon that she feared?

“Go to bed,” Jago said, delivering him to the door of his bedroom. “Bren‑ji. Don’t worry. They’ll be assessing damage. We’ll need to call down to the power station with the information. And of course we take special precautions when we do lose power. It’s only routine. You may hear me go out. You may not. Don’t worry for your safety.”

So one could call the airport on the security radio. One would have thought so. But it was the first he’d heard anyone admit it. And having security trekking through his room all night didn’t promise a good night’s sleep.

But he sat down on the bed and Jago walked back to the other room, leaving him in the almost dark. He took off his robe, put himself beneath the skins, and lay listening, watching the faint light from the fireplace in the other room make moving shadows on the walls and glisten on the glass eyes of the beast opposite his bed.

They say it’s perfectly safe, he thought at it. Don’t worry.

It made a sort of sense to talk to it, the two of them in such intimate relationship. It was a creature of this planet.

It had died mad, fighting atevi who’d enjoyed killing it. Nobody needed to feel sorry for anybody. It wasn’t the last of its species. There were probably hundreds of thousands of its kind out there in the underbrush as mad and pitiless as it was.

Adapted for this earth. It didn’t make attachments to its young or its associates. It didn’t need them. Nature fitted it with a hierarchical sense of dominance, survival positive, proof against heartbreak.

It survived until something meaner killed it and stuck its head on a wall, for company to a foolish human, who’d let himself in for this–who’d chased after the knowledge and then the honor of being the best. Which had to be enough to go to bed with on nights like this. Because there damned sure wasn’t anything else, and if he let himself–

But he couldn’t. The paidhi couldn’t start, at twenty‑six atevi years of age, to humanize the people he dealt with. It was the worst trap. All his predecessors had battled it. He knew it in theory.

He’d been doing all right while he was an hour’s flight away from Mospheira. While his mail arrived on schedule, twice a week. While…

While he’d believed beyond a doubt he was going to see human faces again, and while things were going outstandingly well, and while Tabini and he were such, such good friends.

Key that word, Friend.

The paidhi had been in a damned lot of trouble, right there. The paidhi had been stone blind, right there.

The paidhi didn’t know why he was here, the paidhi didn’t know how he was going to get back again, the paidhi couldn’t get the emotional satisfaction out of Banichi and Jago that Tabini had been feeding him, laughing with him, joking with him, down to the last time they’d met.

Blowing melons to bits. Tabini patting him on the back–gently, because human backs fractured so easily–and telling him he had real talent for firearms. How good was Tabini , more to the point? How good at reading the paidhi was the atevi fourth in line of his side of the bargain?

Tipped off, perhaps, by his predecessor, that the paidhiin had a soft spot for personal attachments?

That the longer you knew them, the greater fools they became, and the more trusting, and the easier to get things from?

There was a painful lump in his throat, a painful, human knot interfering with his rational assessment of the situation. He’d questioned, occasionally, how long he was good for, whether he could adjust. Not every paidhi made it the lifelong commitment they’d signed on for, the pool of available advice had dried up–Wilson hadn’t been a damned bit of help, just gotten strange and so short‑fused the board had talked about replacing him against Tabini’s father’s expressed refusal to have him replaced. Wilson had had his third heart attack the first month he was back on Mospheira, maintained a grim, passionless demeanor in every meeting the two of them had had, never told him a damned thing of any use.

The board called it burn‑out. He’d taken their word for it and tried not to think of Wilson as a son of a bitch. He’d met Tabini on his few fill‑ins for Wilson’s absences, a few days at a time, the two last years of Valasi’s administration–he’d thought Tabini’s predecessor Valasi a real match for Wilson’s glum mood, but he’d liked Tabini–that dangerous word again–but, point of fact, he’d never personally believed in Wilson’s burn‑out. A man didn’t get that strange, that unpleasant, without his own character contributing to it. He’d not liked Wilson, and when he’d asked Wilson what his impression was of Tabini, Wilson had said, in a surly tone, ‘The same as the rest of them.“

He’d not liked Wilson. He had liked Tabini. He’d thought it a mistake on the board’s part to have ever let Wilson take office, a man with that kind of prejudice, that kind of attitude.

He was scared tonight. He looked down the years he might stay in office and the years he might waste in the foolishness he called friendship with Tabini, and saw himself in Wilson’s place, never having had a wife, never having had a child, never having had a friend past the day Barb would find some man on Mospheira a better investment: life was too short to stay at the beck and call of some guy dropping into her life with no explanations, no conversation about his job–a face that began to go dead as if the nerves of expression were cut. He could resign. He could go home. He could ask Barb to marry him.

But he had no guarantee Barb wanted to marry him. No questions, no commitment, no unloading of problems, a fairy‑tale weekend of fancy restaurants and luxury hotels… he didn’t know what Barb really thought, he didn’t know what Barb really wanted, he didn’t know her in any way but the terms they’d met on, the terms they still had. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even close friendship. When he tried to think of the people he’d called friends before he went into university… he didn’t know where they were now, if they’d left the town, or if they’d stayed.

He hadn’t been able to turn the situation over to Deana Hanks for a week. Where did he think he was going to find it in him to turn the whole job over to her and walk out–irrevocably, walk out on what he’d prepared his whole life to do?

Like Wilson–a man seventy years old, who’d just seen Valasi assassinated, who’d just come home, because his career ended with Valasi–with nothing to show for forty‑three years of work but the dictionary entries he’d made, a handful of scholarly articles, and a record number of vetoes on the Transmontane Highway Project. No wife, no family. Nothing but the university teaching post waiting for him, and he couldn’t communicate with the students.

Wilson couldn’t communicate with the human students.

He was going to write a paper when he got out of this, however damning it was, a paper about Wilson, and the atevi interface, and the talk he’d had with Jago, and why Wilson, with that face, with that demeanor, with that attitude, couldn’t communicate with his classes.

Thunder crashed, outside his wall. He jumped, and lay there with his heart doing double beats and his ears still ringing.

The cannon, Jago said. Common occurrence.

He lay there and shook, whether because of the noise, or the craziness of the night. Or because he couldn’t understand any longer why he was here, or why a Bu‑javid guard like Tano drew a gun and fired, when they were out there looking at transformers.

Looking at lightning‑struck transformers, while the lightning played over their heads and the rain fell on them.

Like hell, he thought, like hell, Jago. Shooting at shadows. What shadows , Jago, is Tano expecting out there in the rain?

Shadows that fly in on scheduled airliners… and the tightest security on the planet, except ours, doesn’t know who it is and where they are?

Like hell again , Jago.

VI

« ^ »

A lively night,” the aiji‑dowager said, over tea she swore was safe. “Did you sleep, nand’ paidhi?”

“Intermittently.”

Ilisidi chuckled softly, and pointed out the flight of a dragonette above the misty, chill lake. The balcony railing dripped with recent rain. The sun came up gold above the mountains across the lake, and the mist began to glow with it. The dragonette dived down the face of the cliff, membranous wings spread against the sun, and swept upward again, with something in its claws.

Predator and prey.

“They’re pests,” Ilisidi said. “The mecheiti hate them, but I won’t have the nest destroyed. They were here first. What does the paidhi say?”

“The paidhi agrees with you.”

“What, that those that were here first–have natural ownership?”

Two sips of tea, one bite of roll, and Ilisidi was on the attack. Banichi had said be careful. Tabini had said he could handle it.

He thought a moment, first to agree, then to quibble. Then: “The paidhi agrees that the chain of life shouldn’t be broken. That the loss of that nest would impoverish Malguri.”

Ilisidi’s pale eyes rested on him, impassive as Banichi’s could ever be–she was annoyed, perhaps, at his changing the subject back again.

But he hadn’t changed her proposition, not entirely.

“They’re bandits,” Ilisidi said.

“Irreplaceable,” he said.

“Vermin.”

“The past needs the future. The future needs the past.”

“Vermin, I say, that I choose to preserve.”

“The paidhi agrees. What do you call them?”

“Wi’itkitiin. They make that sound.”

“Wi’itkitiin.” He watched another scaled and feathered diver, and asked himself if Earth had ever known the like. “Nothing else makes that sound.”

“No.”

“Reason enough to save it.”

Ilisidi’s mouth tightened. The grimace became a hint of a laugh, and she spooned up several bites of cereal, put away several thin slices of breakfast steak.

Bren kept pace, figuring one didn’t speak to the aiji‑dowager when she was thinking, and an excellent breakfast was going to get cold. Cooked over wood fire, Cenedi had said, when he wondered how there was anything hot, or cooked. He supposed they managed that in the kitchen fireplace, if there was a fireplace in the kitchen. The thumping Jago had called the generator had stopped sometime during the night. The machine was out of fuel, perhaps, or malfunctioning itself. Maidingi Power swore on their lives and reputations that Malguri would have power, as soon, they said, as they had restored power to the quarter of Maidingi township that was dark and chill this morning.

Meanwhile the castle got along, with fireplaces to warm the rooms and cook the food, with candles to light the halls where light from windows didn’t reach–systems which had once been The System in Malguri. The aiji‑dowager had ordered breakfast set outside, on the balcony, in a chill mountain summer morning–fortunate, Bren thought, that he’d worn his heavier coat this morning, because of the chill already in the rooms. The cold had steam going up from his tea‑cup. It was nippishly pleasant–hard to remember the steamy nights that were the rule in the City in this month, the rainstorms rolling in from the sea.

And with the candles and the wood fires and the ancient stones, it was a blink of the eye to imagine, this misty morning, that he had come unfixed in time, that oared vessels with heraldic sails might appear out of the mist on the end of the lake.

Another dragonette had flown, with its eye on some prey. Its cry wailed away down the heights.

“What are you thinking, paidhi? Some wise and revelatory thought?”

“Thinking about ships. And wood fires. And how Malguri doesn’t need anything from anywhere to survive.”

The aiji‑dowager pursed her lips, rested her chin on her fist. “Aei, a hundred or so staff to do the laundry and carry the wood and make the candles, and it survives. Another five hundred to plow and tend and hunt, to feed the launderers and the wood‑cutters and the candlemakers and themselves, and, oh, yes, we’re self‑sufficient. Except the iron‑workers and the copy‑makers to supply us and the riders and the cannoneers to defend it all from the Unassociated who won’t do their share and had rather prey on those who do. Malguri had electric lights before you came, nadi, I do assure you.” She took a sip of tea, set the cup down and waved her napkin at Cenedi, who hovered in the doorway and mediated the service. He thought the breakfast ended, then. He prepared to rise, but Ilisidi waved a hand toward the terrace stairs.

“Come.”

He was caught, snared. “I beg the dowager’s pardon. My security absolutely forbids me–”

“ Forbids you! Outrageous.–Or did my grandson set them against me?”

“No such thing, I assure you, with utmost courtesy. He spoke very positively–”

“Then let your guards use their famous ingenuity.” She shoved her chair back. Cenedi hastened to assist, and to put her cane under her hand. “Come, come, let me show you the rest of Malguri. Let me show you the Malguri of your imagination.”

He didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t an enemy–at least he hoped she wasn’t, and he didn’t want to make one. Tabini, damn him, had put him here, when he’d known his grandmother was here. Banichi was all reproach for the invitation he’d accepted without having Banichi’s doubtless wise advice–and there was nothing the paidhi saw now to do, being committed to the dowager’s hospitality, except to fall to the floor moaning and plead indisposition–hardly flattering to an already upset cook; or to get up from the table and follow the old woman and see what she wanted him to see.

The latter seemed less damaging to the peace. He doubted Banichi would counsel him differently. So he followed Ilisidi to the outer edge of the terrace and down, and down the stone steps, to yet another terrace, from which another stairs, and then a third terrace, and so below to a paved courtyard, all leisurely, Cenedi going before the dowager, four of the dowager’s security bringing up the rear.

It was farther down than he expected. It involved walking quite far back in the fortress, first through a walled courtyard, then across an earthy‑smelling second walled court, at which he truly began to doubt the direction they were going, and the wisdom of following this party of strangers.

Banichi is going to kill me, Bren thought. Jago is going to file Intent on me. If the dowager’s guard doesn’t have it in mind from the start, Banichi can’t have any idea where I’ve gone, if he isn’t watching already–

Which, thinking of it, he well might–

Something banged, hammerlike, at the gate in front of them, and as Cenedi opened it there came fierce squeals the like of which he’d never heard at close range, only in machimi plays…

Mecheiti, he thought with trepidation, seeing first Cenedi and then the dowager walk through that gale. Horse was what the Remote Equivalencies said.

But horse didn’t cover this utter darkness beyond the gates, defying the servants to hold it, shaking its head, threatening with its formidable rooting‑tusks–it was horse only because atevi rode it, it was horse on the atevi scale of things, the creature that had helped them cross the continents and pull their wagons and patrol their borders. It threw its head in defiance of its handlers, it gnashed its formidable teeth, its tusks capped with gold. Its head‑harness glittered with beads, in the mop of flying mane–it was violent, frightening in its nearness and in the heedless strength with which it pulled the handlers about.

He stopped at the gate, counting it only prudence–but Ilisidi kept walking, after Cenedi. The other guards–there were three more of them than they had started with–passed him where he stood, telling him his fear was inappropriate, whatever the evidence of his senses, and he gathered his resolve and walked out behind the last, suffering, in that tall company, a sudden revision of perspectives: the world had suddenly become all atevi size, and the fragile old ateva leaning on her cane next to this terrible creature, and reaching out her hand to it, was of the same giant scale, the same fearsome darkness. It might have been centuries ago in Malguri. It might have been some aiji of the warlike age–

He watched in trepidation as the mecheita dipped his huge head and took something from Ilisidi’s hand. It gulped that down and began to make little snatches at her fingers with its overshot upper lip as if it expected more–playing games, he realized, delicate in its movements, reacting to her fingers with a duck of its head and a gentleness in its touch he would not have believed from its behavior with the handlers.

Bluff and bluster, he said to himself. The creature was a pet. It was all a show to impress the paidhi, the stupid human.

“Come, come,” Ilisidi said, looking back at him. She leaned the hand with the cane against the mecheita’s neck, using the animal for a prop instead, and wanted him to come up to it.

Well, atevi had tried to bluff him before–including Tabini. Atevi in the court had set up traps to destroy his dignity, and with it his credibility. So he knew the game. He summoned up the mild anger and the amusement it deserved, walked up with his heart in his throat and tentatively offered his hand, expecting the dowager would dissuade him if there was a real threat.

But not putting all his faith in it. He was ready to snatch his hand back as it stretched its neck toward him–and jerked away.

He did the same, heart thumping.

“Again,” said Ilisidi. “Again, paidhi. Don’t worry. He hasn’t taken fingers in a year or two.”

He gathered a breath and held out his hand a second time–this time he and the creature were more cautious of each other, the mecheita’s nostrils opening and shutting rapidly, smelling him, he supposed, recalling from his studies that such animals did rely heavily on smell. Its head was as long as his arm from shoulder to fingertip. Its body shadowed him from the sun. It grew bolder, feeling over his hand with its prehensile upper lip, not seeming to threaten, but dragging his fingers down against the gold‑capped rooting tusks.

It had a little lump of bony plate on its nose, that was bare and gray and smooth. The inquisitive lip was barred with wrinkles, and came to a narrow point between the two gold‑capped tusks. It explored his fingers, snuffling and blowing its great breaths on him in evident enthusiasm, flicking its ears as it had with the dowager, seeming not offended that he had no treat for it. It tickled the soft skin between his fingers, and tasted his fingertips with a file‑like tongue.

It didn’t flinch away from him, that curious rough contact, it took to his whole fingers with skin‑abrading enthusiasm, and he was delighted and afraid and enchanted, that something in the world met him with such complete, uncomplicated curiosity–accepting what it met. It wasn’t offended at his strange taste, that for the dowager’s hopes of his discomfiture.

Then it took the ultimate, unanticipated liberty of nosing him in the face. His hands flew up to fend it off, and his next view of it was from the pavings looking up at its looming shadow.

“Hei,” Ilisidi said, holding the creature’s harness, and standing over him, “don’t push on the nose, nand’ paidhi. Babs is sorry, aren’t you, Babs? Didn’t expect a hand on your nose, did you, poor Babs?”

He gathered himself up–he had saved his skull from the pavings, but not his backside. He brushed himself off and doggedly offered his hand again to the mecheita–one didn’t admit an embarrassment, among atevi, even while the dowager chuckled at his discomfort and said he should take Nokhada, as a relatively placid mount.

“Take… where, aiji‑mai?”

“To see Malguri, of course,” Ilisidi declared, as if his agreement had encompassed everything. She gave her cane to Cenedi, hiked up the skirt of her coat and hit Babs on the shoulder, the signal–he knew it from television–for Babs to put out a foreleg. Another man helped Ilisidi with his joined hands, and Ilisidi swung up to a practiced landing on the riding‑pad as Babs surged up again, smooth and quick as a courtly bow. They towered above him, Ilisidi and the mecheita, black against the sky, the beast that was wholly shadow, and Ilisidi, whose pale eyes were the only brightness, like a figure out of Malguri’s violent past, that swept past him, and turned about and fidgeted to be moving.

There was a great deal of activity out of the further building, a stable from which other mecheiti came with their handlers, a crowd of black shapes, as tall, as ominous from where he stood, one for every man in Ilisidi’s party.

And himself. “Forgive me,” he began, when Cenedi signaled the handlers to bring one of the creatures to him. “This isn’t cleared. I don’t know how to ride. I beg to recall that I was sent here for my safety, at considerable difficulty of my absence from critical matters in court–I’ve not consulted with my own security, whose reputations–”

Nokhada’s passage cut off his view, a living mountain between him and the stone wall of Malguri. “Let her have your scent,” Cenedi said, having the lead rope, and holding the creature still. “Just don’t press on the nose. The reaction is quite involuntary. The tusks are capped, but all the same–one could deal damage.”

The mecheita stretched out its neck for a lazy sniff of his hand, and a more curious examination of his clothing, and a lick at his face and a try for his neck. He stepped back, not quite in time, from the swing of its head–a blunt tusk bruised his jaw and brought stars to his eyes, while Cenedi restrained it and the servants, nothing heeding his protests, prepared to help htm up the way they had helped Ilisidi.

“Just put your foot here, nand’ paidhi, it’s quite all right.”

“I can’t ride, dammit, I don’t know how!”

“It’s quite all right,” Cenedi said. “Just hold to the pad‑rings. Leave the reins alone. She’ll follow Babs.”

“Where?” he asked bluntly. “Where are we going?”

“Just out and back. Come. I’ll assure your safety, nand’ paidhi. It’s quite all right.”

Call Cenedi a liar, in Cenedi’s domain? He was surrounded by the people he’d left safety to follow, because he wouldn’t be bluffed into retreat. Cenedi vowed he was safe. It was Cenedi’s responsibility, and Banichi would hold him to it–with his life.

The paidhi could only be a certain degree dead. He was replaceable, in an hour, once Mospheira knew he’d broken his neck.

“It’s your responsibility,” he said to Cenedi, taking up the reins. “Tabini‑aiji has filed Intent, on my behalf. I trust you’re aware what went on last night.”

With which he prepared to put his foot in the stirrup, and let Cenedi worry. He resolutely struck Nokhada on the shoulder, to make him or her or it extend the foreleg: he knew from television how one got up.

But as Nokhada inclined in the brief bow, and he couldn’t get the stirrup situated, or his foot situated in it, the handlers gave him a shove up toward the rings. His light weight went up from their hands in a greater hurry than he expected, and he had only just landed on the riding‑pad when Nokhada came up on her feet.

He went off the other side with a wild snatch at the riding‑pad, into the hands of security, as Nokhada went in a circle.

Atevi seldom laughed aloud. Ilisidi did, as Babs threw his head and circled and snorted and handlers tried to collect Nokhada.

There was no choice, now. Absolutely none. He dusted himself off, asked Cenedi for the rein, and, shaking in the knees, remade his acquaintance with Nokhada, who had been made a fool along with him.

“Make both of us look good,” he muttered to a mountainous shoulder, and tried a second time to make Nokhada extend the leg. “Hit harder,” Cenedi said, so he hit harder, and Nokhada sighed wearily and put the leg out.

A second time he put his foot in the stirrup, and a second time Nokhada came up with him.

This time he expected it. This time he grabbed the pad‑rings and leaned into Nokhada’s motion–landed astride, then tilted as Nokhada continued to turn in circles.

“Loosen the rein, loosen the rein, nand’ paidhi !”

He heard the dowager laughing uproariously and clung to the rings as he let the rein slip through his thumb and forefinger. Nokhada shook herself and turned around and around again.

“Ha!” Ilisidi said, as his circular, humiliating course showed him other riders getting mounted, with far less spectacle. He tried to straighten the reins out. He tried with pats of his hand to make friends with Nokhada, who in her now slower circles, seemed more interested in investigating his right foot, which he moved anxiously out of range.

Then Ilisidi shouted out, Babs passed him in a sudden rush of shadow, Nokhada took it for permission and made the last revolution a surge forward that jerked the rein through his hand so hard it burned. The stone face of the building passed in a lurching blur, the gate did, and while he was clinging to the pad‑rings and trying to find his balance, they were across the courtyard, headed through an arch and down a stone chute beside the stairs that ended in an open gate, and sunlight.

A cliff was in front of them. He saw Ilisidi and Babs turn to the road, and he jerked on Nokhada’s head to make her turn, too, which Nokhada took for an insult, dancing deliberately out on the brink of disaster, with the misty lake beyond and empty air below.

“Don’t jerk her head, nand’ paidhi!” someone shouted from close behind him, and Cenedi came riding past, bumping his leg, sending Nokhada on a perverse course along the very edge, the creature shaking her head and kicking at nothing in particular.

On the upward course ahead, Ilisidi stopped, and turned about and waited until they caught up, among the rest of her guard. Nokhada was sweating and snorting as he jogged them to a stop beside Cenedi, and he was perfectly content, trembling in every joint, that Nokhada should stop and stand as the other riders gathered about them.

He’d survived. He was on a solid part of the mountain. Nokhada couldn’t fling them both into the lake. That was a hard‑won triumph.

“Caught your breath?” Ilisidi asked him. “How are you doing, nand’ paidhi?”

“All right,” he lied, out of breath.

“The lake trail’s a little steep for a novice,” Ilisidi said, and he thought she had to be joking. There was no trail over that edge back there. Surely there wasn’t. “Are we ready?–Thumb and finger, nand’ paidhi. Gently, gently. She’ll follow. Just hold on.”

Babs moved, Nokhada moved, as if she was on an invisible string. Babs made a running rush at the slope, and Nokhada waited and did the same, right behind, with Cenedi behind him. But two of the men were ahead of Ilisidi, and over the ridge and out of sight–security, he supposed, though he supposed that any sniper would just wait for a more profitable target.

“Someone did try to kill me,” he said breathlessly to Cenedi, in case no one had ever quite made all the details clear, in case Cenedi had thought he was other than serious. “In Shejidan. Under the aiji’s own roof. Without filing. I supposed Banichi must have mentioned that. It’s not just a supposed threat.”

“We’re well aware,” Cenedi said. “The tea was our best chance.”

Cenedi was joking, he hoped. Deadpan retaliation for his remark when they mounted up.

But Cenedi claimed he’d known all along that there was a hazard, and Cenedi, or Ilisidi, had insisted all the same on bringing him outside the walls, and risking his neck with Nokhada. On one level, it was Tabini’s kind of gesture, absolute defiance of his restrictions and the better thoughts of his security–but he remained uneasy in spite of Cenedi’s assurances. The thought flitted through his head that if there were enemies or kidnappers in Malguri… he could be riding with them.

But Banichi hadn’t warned him anything of the sort. Banichi had brought Cenedi into his bedroom. Cenedi said he knew why they were at Malguri, and thought he could guarantee his safety.

Nokhada dipped her head of a sudden to investigate the ground–not the most opportune moment for Nokhada to do that, and he made a grab at the rings and jerked Nokhada’s head to bring it up–which brought Nokhada to an inglorious, sulking halt for two heartbeats before Nokhada moved on her own, still ducking her head, nose to the ground while she was climbing.

“She has a scent,” Cenedi said. Cenedi’s own mecheita was doing much the same, and so was Babs, up the hill. “I’d hang on, nand’ paidhi. Babs is lead.”

“Lead what?” he asked.

“Mecheit’‑aiji,” Cenedi said, and he had a sudden recollection of televised hunts, of the legendary ability of mecheiti to track atevi fugitives or four‑footed game. He remembered Babs going over his hand, and Nokhada smelling him over. He had the sudden apprehension that it wasn’t just television, wasn’t anything made‑up, or exaggerated.

And he couldn’t control the damned mecheita he was on to prevent it taking him wherever Ilisidi took a whim to go.

Babs gave a sudden whip of his tail and with a scatter of gravel took out diagonally across the slope. Nokhada and Cenedi’s mount and the rest pivoted and launched themselves as if they’d been shot at–Nokhada recklessly, roughly surging uphill in Babs’ tracks, outpacing Cenedi and the rest. He didn’t want the lead–and all he could do was hang on to the rings and not drop the rein.

A gully loomed ahead, a wash of soft earth down the hill, and Ilisidi showed no disposition to slow Babs down.

Babs took it.

Oh, God, he thought, envisioning himself bleeding on the ground, run over by the mecheiti behind. He tucked down, he gripped the rings with all his might–he didn’t mass much, he didn’t mass much, he kept telling himself as Nokhada thundered across the slope–Nokhada was going to go and Nokhada didn’t intend to fall–Nokhada took a four‑beat turn into the jump, hind legs shoved, shoulders rose–

Then came a floating feeling, a headlong plunge against which his body instinctively reacted backward–and a teeth‑cracking jolt as somehow he went forward again and his mouth hit the back of Nokhada’s neck.

Nokhada’s legs were under them again, all four of them, in a pounding rhythm–Babs’ dark rump showed in front of them as Babs suddenly darted left and right on the close track of something brown and white running ahead of them. Nokhada ran a straighter course, other mecheiti running like earthquake behind her.

A shot rang out ahead, from Ilisidi. Whatever it was–went down in a cloud of dust and flattening grass as it skidded downslope.

The guards all cheered the shot, as Babs stopped and the mecheiti came to a blowing, stamping halt around Babs, laying back ears and snorting and sidling about.

Bren’s mouth was cut. He blotted it, watching one of the guards ride down the slope to where the game had fallen. Everyone thought it a wonderful shot on Ilisidi’s part. He supposed it was. He was shaking. His lip was swelling already, and he must have bruised Nokhada’s ribs with the clenching of his legs–his inner thigh muscles were sore and shuddery, and he was sweating, after doing nothing whatsoever in the chase but hold on.

While the aiji‑dowager had just shot supper for herself and her staff, and the mecheiti were all wild‑eyed and excited, at, one supposed, the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air.

“How do we fare, nand’ paidhi?”

“I’m still here, nai‑ji.” That sounded too much like a challenge. “Credit to the mecheita, not myself.”

“Are you hurt, nand’ paidhi?”

Dependable. Exactly like Tabini. Now the concern.

“Her neck and my face,” he said ruefully.

“Too far forward,” Ilisidi said, and started off again at a brisk clip, uphill, while–a glance over his shoulder–the one guard was hauling the carcass up onto the riding‑pad.

The beasts’ abilities weren’t just television. Machimi plays that showed a fugitive ripped apart by those tusks wasn’t exaggeration, he was convinced of it. He didn’t want to be on the ground in front of those feet, or in the way of those teeth, which, in war, they’d not blunt‑capped.

Cenedi’s assurances of safety with them began to seem more and less substantial. But–he began to recall with a shudder Babs smelling him over, a smell Babs could never have met before. The mecheiti‑aiji, Cenedi had called him, Babs having fixed that smell in his beast‑brain and the associative group hierarchy the experts swore extended right into the animal kingdom–

Politics. Four‑footed politics. Colony behavior, they called it on Mospheira, where they studied small indigenous animals, but nothing–nothing like the mecheita, nothing like these hunters, that ate –he remembered his history–anything they could root up or catch. Omni‑vores. Pack hunters.

His legs were limp. His hand was shaking, holding the rein, from the excess of adrenalin, he said to himself.

Like the gunshot. He wasn’t used to such things. They engaged his senses wholly, insanely, on a level a professional risk‑taker like Cenedi surely didn’t deal with anymore: he didn’t know what was important, so he took in everything that hit his senses, like a madman, and tried to do something when, to a well‑ordered mind like Cenedi’s, there wasn’t anything to do.

The single guardsman they had left overtook them at a diagonal on the hill, with a small, graceful creature tied to the back of his riding‑pad. Its head lolled. Its eyes were like the beast’s on the bedroom wall, not angry, though: soft, and astonished. A small trickle of blood ran from black, fine nostrils, a pretty nose, a pretty face. Bren didn’t want dinner with the dowager tonight.

Sausages didn’t have such mortality about them. He preferred distance from his meals. Tabini called it a moral flaw. He called it civilization and Tabini called it delusion: You eat meat out of season, Tabini would say. Out of time with the earth, you sell flesh for profit. You eat what never runs free: you call that civilized ?

He hadn’t an argument against that reasoning. He rode at Babs’ swishing tail, as the company remarked to each other again how fine a shot the dowager had made, and Ilisidi said that now that they had stocked the larder, they could enjoy the rest of the ride.

At a slower pace, Bren hoped: the insides of his legs, even relaxing, now, were finding the riding‑pad an unnatural stretch, and when he tried to find a comfortable posture, he kicked Nokhada by accident and went humiliatingly off the trail, right down the mountainside, before he could get the mecheita stopped and redirected.

“Nand’ paidhi?” Cenedi asked from above.

“We’re coming,” he said. He supposed Nokhada made a ‘we.’ Nokhada certainly expressed an opinion, in flattened ears and plodding gait, once they reached the trail again, overtaking the rear of the column, where Cenedi waited.

“What happened?” Cenedi asked.

“We’re figuring it out,” he muttered. But Cenedi gave him a fast rundown of the signals: touch of the feet for direction, light tugs of the rein for attention signals, or to restrain outright rebellion. Don’t touch the nose, don’t pull down on the head. Left foot, go right, right foot, go left; tug lightly, go faster, tug hard, go slow, don’t kick a man in the groin or a mecheita behind the ribs.

Which seemed a civilized arrangement.

“If he intends to jump,” Cenedi told him, “do as you did. Your weight won’t bother him.–Are the stirrups short enough?”

“I fear, nadi, I wouldn’t possibly know.”

“If your legs cramp, say so.”

“They don’t.” He didn’t complain of the rubbery condition. He put that down to sheer fright and a workout of muscles he wasn’t used to using.

“Good,” Cenedi said, and rode off at a steep diagonal up the ridge, Cenedi’s mechieta ducking its head and sniffing the ground intermittently, while its long legs never broke stride.

Curious ability. It was smelling for something along the ground, and lifted its head to smell the wind as they reached the crest of the ridge.

And Cenedi kept the creature under control so damned effortlessly. Cenedi stopped, signalled them with a wave of his hand, and Ilisidi put Babs up the ridge at a fair clip.

Nokhada took the diagonal course uphill, then, hellbent on regaining second place to Babs. Dammit! Bren thought, cutting the guards off in their climb; but he was afraid to pull on the rein, among the rocks and sliding gravel.

“Excuse me!” he called back over his shoulder. “Nadiin, it’s her idea!” That drew laughter from the guards, as Nokhada fell in at Babs’ tail. Better than resentment, at least. There was a hierarchy among mecheiti, and Ilisidi and everyone in the party had known Nokhada was going to follow Babs, come hell or high water. They’d had their joke. He’d gained a cut lip and sore muscles, but he hadn’t fallen off and he’d been a fair sport about the joke–it was the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini’s court, at least, and the way he’d learned to deal with Tabini, early on.

One just didn’t back away from a challenge–and atevi would try a newcomer, if for nothing more than to determine his place in the order of things: they did it to anyone and they did it as a matter of course, on an instant’s judgment to find out a fool or a leader… neither of which he planned to be with them, not to threaten Ilisidi or Cenedi or any of them.

And after he had realized Ilisidi’s joke at his expense and let them know he saw it, then things were easier, then he could ride at Babs’ lazily switching tail and be easy about the position in which Ilisidi had set him, giving him a mecheita proper to a high‑ranking visitor from Tabini’s own staff; he could quite well appreciate the humor in that, too–a mecheita that was going to give the unskilled visitor hell, especially if he thought he was going to adjust his position in line, or argue with Ilisidi.

Humiliate him? Ilisidi could do that with a flick of her riding crop. Follow a competition jumper in terrain like this? The paidhi‑aiji would be extremely lucky if only his dignity fractured.

But he must have passed Ilisidi’s trial of him, since Cenedi had given him at least a fair sketch of left, right, go, and stop–enough knowledge to put a fool in trouble or keep a wiser man from outright folly–like that business on the exit from the gate, and the cliff, which now he was convinced must not have been so sheer as his immediate impression of it, or Nokhada more in command of her footing than she seemed. Dump the paidhi down‑slope? Yes. Lose a high‑bred mecheita? The woman who’d attacked a course official with her riding crop, over scratches?

He wasn’t wholly certain. The tea service had certainly been calculated to send some message; and he wasn’t wholly certain Ilisidi was innocent in the matter of the tea–although he would bet the severity of his reaction had left the dowager and Cenedi some little chagrined: a general atevi recklessness toward questions of life and death and bihawa , that aggressive impulse to test strangers, had betrayed them and left them somewhat at disadvantage: to that degree he suspected it was in fact an accident–a blemish on mutual dignity they had to repair.

Had to. And he couldn’t have accepted the breakfast invitation and then declined to come with Ilisidi on this ride. He’d read it right, let Banichi say what he would, he’d read it correctly.

And, having achieved something of a Place in the dowager’s party, he hoped hereafter simply to enjoy the sun and the mountain–the very height of the mountain, the world spread out below in a spectacular view.

They rode in tall, windswept grass, and yellow, ragged flowers that abounded along the ridge, with an unobstructed view across the lake to the mountains on the other side. The breaths he drew were freighted with rich smells of the earth and the grass and crushed flowers, the oiled leather of the harness, and the dusty, musky smell of the mecheiti themselves. The grass and the pebbly rubble at the roots brought back vividly the last time he and Tabini had hunted at Taiben, slogging afoot through the dusty hills–