Foreigner

Tabini trying to show him the finer points of hunting and stalking–

Everything came back to him so very clearly: that day, that exact time, as if the realities of the countryside and the reality of the city compartmentalized themselves so thoroughly they maintained separate time‑streams, so that, entering one… he took up where he had left off, with no events between. Time slipped wildly on him, turned treacherous. Today’s foolish hazard had slid unawares to chancy, intoxicating success, the paidhi riding a thousand, two thousand miles from the safety of Mospheira and enjoying the sights and smells and sounds no human had ever experienced. The mechetti of the machimi plays had turned real as the dust and the flowers and the sun.

And strangest of all to his ears came the silence that wasn’t silence, but the total absence, for the first time in his life that he was ever aware, of machine sounds. The sounds that reached his ears were rich enough, the wind and the creak of leather and jingle of harness and bridle rings, the scuff of gravel, the sighing of the grass along the hill–but he’d never been anywhere, even Taiben, where he couldn’t see power lines, or hear, however faintly, the sound of aircraft, or a passing train, or just the generalized hum of machinery working–and he’d never known it existed, until he heard its absence.

Below them, the miniaturized walls of Malguri, as few atevi surely ever were privileged to view them. There wasn’t a road, wasn’t a rail, wasn’t a trace of habitation apparent in all the hills and the lake shore, except those walls.

Time slipped again. He imagined the wind‑stirred banners of the machimi plays, the meetings of treachery and connivance in the hills, the fortress destined for attack–how to get the lord into the open, or assassins within the walls, engaging single individuals, instead of armies… saving lives, saving resources, saving the land from future feuds.

And always, in such plays, the retainer with an ancestral grudge, the trusted assassin with the unevident man’chi , the thing the aiji on the windy ridge or the aiji within the fortress should have known and didn’t. One could all but hear the banners cracking in the wind, hear the rattle of armor… atevi civilization, atevi history that flourished now only in the machimi, on television–where human history flourished not at all.

There was something unexpectedly seductive about the textures… from the brightness of blood on the kill to the white and brown fur of the animal, from the casual drop of dung to the smell of flowers and the scent of crushed grass and the lazy switch of mecheita ears. It wasn’t the same reality as in the halls of the Bu‑javid. It certainly wasn’t Mospheira. It was the atevi world as humans might never see it, neighboring, as they did, only the smoke‑stacks and steam‑engines of Shejidan.

It was a world that, given a hundred years, atevi themselves might never see again, or never understand, because the future that might have naturally grown from Malguri’s past–never would grow at all in a solely atevi way, now that Mospheira had given atevi the railroads and communications satellites, now that jets sped atevi travellers across the country too high and too fast to see a place like Malguri.

He argued with Tabini about meat, and seasons, and thought atevi ways… inconvenient.

But that argument was the same thing as the jets and the satellites. Another little piece of Malguri under attack.

Thinking of that word…

“Have you talked specifically to Banichi, nadi?” he asked Cenedi, who rode behind him. “I would hate to ride into security installations.”

Cenedi gave him an expressionless stare. “So would we, nadi.”

He knew that response. Helpful as a stone wall. Which said the paidhi wasn’t supposed to know about the installations–or that Cenedi didn’t know, and wasn’t in Banichi’s confidence, and now thought that he was, which couldn’t help matters if they rode into something he couldn’t foresee.

But the two men that had ridden out from their number at the beginning still hadn’t rejoined them–or even shown up again. They must be the other side of the ridge. And now and again Babs in particular would drop his head to sniff at the trail, Nokhada likewise–unexpected little jolts and a pitch of Nokhada’s shoulder, but he learned to read the intent in the set of Nokhada’s ears and the general rhythm of her stride.

Not easy beasts to trap, he began to think. Not beasts that would go blindly into something wrong on the trail.

But he began to be easier on that account. Malguri’s grounds weren’t, then, the sort of weed‑grown, desolate place where enterprising assassins could just come and go at will. The very presence of the mecheiti would dissuade intruders.

And one could legitimately believe, after all, that the power outage that still held in Malguri this morning was the legitimate result of a lightning strike, considering that power seemed to have gone out over a quarter of the township in the valley.

Ilisidi had asked if he had slept through the disturbance–no, Ilisidi had called it a lively night, and asked whether he’d slept through it.

Through what? Power failures? Or gunshots in the night, Tano’s nervous finger on the trigger, and Banichi on the radio?

Neither Banichi nor Jago had clued him what to do, if they’d had any idea of the proposed morning hunt. Neither of them had forewarned him he might be asked… had trusted him as the paidhi, maybe. Or just not known.

But Tabini, who doubtless knew the aiji‑dowager as well as anyone in Shejidan, had said, regarding his dealings with Ilisidi–use your diplomacy.

Ilisidi slowed and stopped ahead of him, where the trail began a downward pitch again.

“From this place,” Ilisidi said, waving her hand to the view ahead, “you can see three provinces, Maidingi, Didaini, Taimani. How do you regard my land?”

“Beautiful,” he said honestly.

“ My land , nand’ paidhi.”

Nothing Ilisidi said was idle, or without calculation.

“Your land, nai‑ji. I confess I resisted being sent to Malguri. I thought it remote from my duties. I was mistaken. I wouldn’t have known about the dragonettes otherwise. I wouldn’t have ridden, in all my life.” In the moment, he agreed inside with what he was saying, enjoying his brief respite from Banichi, Jago, and sane responsibility, enjoying–the atevi attitude was contagious–his chance to push the restrictions under which the paidhi necessarily lived and conducted business. “But Banichi will kill me when I get back.”

Ilisidi looked askance at him, and the corners of her mouth tightened.

Literal atevi minds. “Figuratively speaking, nai‑ji.”

“You’re sure of my grandson.”

Disquieting question. “Should I have doubt, nai‑ji?” Ilisidi was certainly the one to ask, but one couldn’t trust the answer. No one knew Ilisidi’s man’chi , where it lay. She had never made it clear, at least that he knew, and, presumably, if Banichi or Jago knew, they would have told him.

But no more did he know where Tabini’s was. That was always the way with aijiin–that they had none, or had none in reach of their subordinates.

“Tabini’s a steady lad,” Ilisidi said. “Young. Very young. Tech solves everything.”

A hint of her thoughts and her motives? He wasn’t sure. “Even the paidhi doesn’t maintain that to be the case, nai‑ji.”

“Doesn’t the Treaty forbid–I believe this was your insistence–interference in our affairs?”

“That it does, nai‑ji.” Dangerous ground. Very dangerous ground. Hell if this woman was as fragile as she looked. “Have I seemed to do contrary things? Please do me the kindness of telling me so.”

“Does my grandson tell you so?”

“If he told me I was interfering, I do swear to you, nai‑ji, I would certainly reconsider my actions.”

She said nothing for a space. It left him, riding beside her in the windy silence, to think anxiously whether anything he had said or done or supported in the various councils could be controversial, or as the dowager hinted, interfere in atevi affairs, or push technology too fast.

“Please, aiji‑ji. Be blunt. Am I opposing or advancing a position with which you disagree?”

“What a strange question,” Ilisidi said. “Why should I tell you that?”

“Because I would try to find out your reasons, nai‑ji, not to oppose your interests, not to preempt your resources–but to avoid areas of your extreme interest. Let me recall to you, we don’t use assassins, nai‑ji. That’s not even a resource for us.”

“But they are, for atevi who may support you in your positions.”

He’d heard that argument before. He could get around it with Tabini. He longed after Tabini’s company, he longed only to ask him, forthrightly to learn things… that no one else was telling him lately.

And as now and again in the hours since he’d come to Malguri, he suffered another of those moments of dislocation–at one instant convinced that things were all right, and then, with no particular reason, doubting that, and recalling how completely he was isolated, more isolated than the paidhi had ever been from his resources.

“Forgive my question,” he said to Ilisidi. “But the paidhi isn’t always wise enough to understand his position in your affairs. I hope for your good opinion, nai‑ji.”

“What do you hope to accomplish in your tenure?”

He hadn’t expected that question. But he’d answered it, repeatedly, in councils. “An advancement for atevi and humans, nai‑ji. An advancement, a step toward technological equality, at a pace which won’t do harm.”

“That’s a given, isn’t it? By the Treaty, a dull and tedious given. Be less modest. Name the specific, wondrous thing you’d have done before you die… the gift you wish most, in your great wisdom, to bestow on us.”

He didn’t think it a harmless question. He could name certain things. He honestly didn’t have a clear answer.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What, the paidhi without a notion what he wishes to do?”

“A step at a time, nai‑ji. I don’t know what may be possible. And telling you… would in itself violate the principles…”

“The most ambitious thing you’ve ever advanced.”

“The rail system.”

“Pish. We invented the rail. You improved it.”

That was true, though atevi trains and steamships had been only the most rudimentary design, and boilers had burst with frightening regularity.

“So what more, paidhi? Rockets to the moons? Travel amongst the stars?”

A far more dangerous topic. “I’d like, yes, to see atevi at least reach that threshold in my lifetime. Nai‑ji, so much is possible from there. So much you could do then. But we aren’t sure of the changes that would make, and I want to understand what would result. I want to give good advice. That’s my job, nai‑ji.” He had never himself seen it so clearly, until now. “We’re at the edge of space. And so much changes once you can look down on the world.”

“What changes?”

One more dangerous question, this one cultural and philosophical. He looked outward, at the lake, the whole world seeming to lie below the path they rode.

“Height changes your perspective, nai‑ji. We see three provinces from here. But my eye can’t see the treaty‑boundaries.”

“Mine can. That mountain ridge. The river. They’re quite evident.”

“But were this mountain as high as the great moon, nai‑ji, and if were you born on this very high mountain, would you see the lines? Or, if you saw them, would they mean to you what they mean to people born on the plain, these distant, invisible lines?”

“ Man’chi is man’chi. Man’chi is important. And to a dweller on the border–what meaning, these lines aijiin agree on? Man’chi is never visible.”

It was gratifying to expect the answer one got, the same that Tabini inevitably gave. It was gratifying to think one did accurately forecast atevi sentiments. It was useful to know about Ilisidi.

“So that wouldn’t change,” he said. “Even if you stood on the highest mountain.”

“ Man’chi would never change,” Ilisidi said.

“Even if you left the sight of the world for years and years.”

“In hell and on earth, man’chi would not change. But you don’t understand this, you humans.” Babs struck a slight rise, and for a moment walked solitary, until Nokhada caught up. Ilisidi dowager said, “Or you never tell your enemies, if you do change.”

That, too, was in the machimi plays. The catastrophic event, the overturning of a life’s understandings. But always toward the truth, as he saw it. Always toward what man’chi should have been.

Ilisidi offered no explanation of her remark. Perhaps he was supposed to have asked something wise. But imagination failed him.

“We truthfully didn’t understand your view of things, nai‑ji, when we first arrived. We didn’t understand atevi. You didn’t understand us. That’s one of the great and unfortunate reasons of the War.”

“The unfortunate reason of the War was humans taking Mospheira, to which they had no right. It was hundreds of thousands of atevi dislodged from their homes. It was man’chi broken, because we couldn’t deal with your weapons, nand’ paidhi.” The dowager’s voice wasn’t angry, only severe, and emphatic. “And slowly you raise us up to have technology, and more technology. Does this not seem a foolish thing to do?”

Not the first time he’d met that question, either. Atevi asked it among themselves, when they thought the paidhi would hear no report of their discussion. Thwarted councillors shouted it at the paidhi in council. Not even to Tabini could he give the untranslatable, the true answer: We thought we could make you our friends.

So he gave the official, the carefully worked out, translatable reply: “We saw association possible. We saw advantage to us in your good will in this region where fortune had cast us.”

“You tell us whether we shall have roads, or rail. You deny us what pleases you to deny. You promise us wonders. But the great wonders, as I hear, are on Mospheira, for the enjoyment of humans, who have paved roads.”

‘’A very few. Fewer than you have.“

“On a continent a thousand times the size of Mospheira. Be honest, nand’ paidhi.”

“With vehicles that don’t use internal combustion. Which will come, nai‑ji, which will come to atevi.”

“In your lifetime… or in mine?”

“Perhaps in thirty years. Perhaps less. Depending on whether we have the necessary industry. Depending on finding resources. Depending on the associations and the provinces finding it politic to cooperate in producing scarce items, in depending on computers. Depending on man’chi , and who’s willing and not willing to work together, and how successful the first programs are… but I needn’t tell that to the aiji‑dowager, who knows the obstinacy of vested interests.”

He had made the dowager laugh, if briefly and darkly. The sun cast Ilisidi’s black profile in shadow against the hazy distances of the sky and the lake. They rode a while in silence, there on the crest of the mountain, with the wind picking up the mecheiti’s manes and himself rocking, child‑sized, on the back of a creature bred to carry atevi into their infrequent and terrible wars.

“There’s the airport,” Ilisidi said, pointing ahead of them.

Straining his eyes, he could make out what he thought was Maidingi Airport, beside a hazy sprawl he decided must be Maidingi township. Nearer at hand, he could just make out the road, or what he took for it, wending down the mountain.

“Is that the town? he asked, knowing it was a stupid question, but only to break the silence; and Ilisidi said it was Maidingi.

After that, looking out over the broad plain, Ilisidi pointed out the direction of villages outlying Maidingi township, and told him the names of plants and regions and the mountains across the lake.

But in his mind was the history he had seen in the books in his room, the castle standing against attack from the Association across the lake, even before cannon had come into the question. Malguri had stood for centuries against intrusion from the east. Banners flying, smoke of cannon on the walls…

Don’t romanticize, his predecessor had told him. Don’t imagine. See and observe and report.

Accuracy. Not wishful thinking.

Lives relied on the paidhi’s accuracy. Billions of lives relied on the truth of his perception.

And relied equally on his representing both sides accurately to each other.

But, he thought, how much have we forgotten about them? How much have we encouraged them to lose? How much have we overridden, imposing our priorities and our technological sequence over theirs?

Or are those possibilities really forgotten here? Have they ever wholly been forgotten?

They rode to the very end of the ridge. Clouds were rolling in over the southern end of the lake, dark gray beneath, flashing with lightnings, brooding over slate‑gray waters. But sunlight slanted over the blue peaks to the east, turning the water along the Malguri shore as bright as polished silver. A dragonette leapt from its nest among the rocks, crying protest to the winds, and thunder rumbled. Another dragonette was creeping back up the mountain the long, slow way they must, once they’d flown, wings folded, wing‑claws finding purchase on the steep rocks.

Dragonettes existed in Shejidan. Buildings near the park had slanted walls, he’d heard, specifically to afford them purchase. Atevi still valued them, for their stubbornness, for their insistence on flying, when they knew the way back was uncertain and fraught with dangers.

Predator on the wing and potential prey on the return.

Ilisidi turned Babs about on the end of the trail, and took a downward, slanting course among the rocks. He followed.

In a time more of riding, they passed an old and ruined building Cenedi said was an artillery installation from a provincial dispute. But its foundations, Cenedi said, had been older than that, as a fortress called Tadiiri, the Sister, once bristling with cannon.

“How did it go to ruins?” he asked.

“A falling out with Malguri,” Cenedi said. “And a barrel of wine that didn’t agree with the aiji of Tadiiri or his court.”

Poison. “But the whole fortress?” he blurted out.

“It lacked finesse,” Cenedi said.

So he knew of a certainty then what Cenedi was, the same as Banichi and Jago. And he believed now absolutely that his near demise had embarrassed Cenedi, as Cenedi had said, professionally.

“After that,” Cenedi said, “Tadiiri was demolished, its cannon taken down. You saw them at the front entrance, as you drove in.”

He had not even been sure they were authentic. A memorial, he had thought. He didn’t know such things. But the age of wars and cannon had been so brief–and war on the earth of the atevi so seldom a matter of engagement, almost always of maneuver, and betrayal, with leaders guarded by their armies. It was assassination one most had to guard against, on whatever scale.

And here he rode with Ilisidi, and her guard, leaving the one Tabini had lent him. Or was it, in atevi terms, a maneuver, a posturing, a declaration of position and power, their forcing him to join them? He might have found something else unhealthful to drink, or eat. There were so many hazards a human could meet, if they meant him harm.

And Banichi and Cenedi did speak, and did intrude into each other’s territory–Banichi had been angry at him for accepting the invitation, Banichi had said there was no way to retrieve him from his promise–but all of it was for atevi reasons, atevi dealing with a situation between Tabini and his grandmother, at the least, and maybe a trial of Banichi’s authority in the house: he simply couldn’t read it.

Maybe Ilisidi and Tabini had made their point and maybe, hereafter, he could hope for peace between the two wings of the house–Tabini’s house, Tabini’s politics with generations before him, and paidhiin before himself.

Diplomacy, indeed, he thought, falling back to Babs’ tail again, in his place and deftly advised of it.

He understood who ruled in Malguri. He had certainly gotten that clear and strong. He supposed, through Banichi, that Tabini had.

But in the same way he supposed himself a little safer now, inside Ilisidi’s guardianship as well as Tabini’s.

VII

« ^ »

I n a courtyard echoing with shouts and the squeals of mecheiti, Nokhada extended a leg at his third request, mostly, Bren thought, because the last but her had already done the same.

He slithered down Nokhada’s sun‑warmed side, and viewed with mistrust the mecheita’s bending her neck around and nibbling his sleeve, butting capped but still formidable tusks into his side as he tried to straighten the twisted rein. But he wasn’t so foolish as to press on Nokhada’s nose again, and Nokhada lifted her head, sniffing the air, a black mountain between him and the mid‑morning sun, complaining at something unseen–or only liking the echoes of her own voice.

The handlers moved in to take the rein. He gave Nokhada a dismissing pat on the shoulder, figuring that was due. Nokhada made a rumbling sound, and ripped the rein from his hand, following the rest of the group the handlers were leading away into the maze of courtyards.

“Use her while you’re here,” Ilisidi said, near him. “At any time, at any hour. The stables have their instructions to accommodate the paidhi‑aiji.”

“The dowager is very kind,” he said, wondering if there was skin left on his palm.

“Your seat is still doubtful,” she said, took her cane from an attendant and walked off toward the steps.

He took that for a dismissal.

But she stopped at the first step and looked back, leaning with both hands on her cane. “Tomorrow morning. Breakfast.” The cane stabbed the air between them. “No argument, nand’ paidhi. This is your host’s privilege.”

He bowed and followed Ilisidi up the steps in the general upward flow of her servants and her security, who probably overlapped such functions, like his own.

His lip was swollen, he had lost the outer layer of skin on his right hand, intimate regions of his person were sore and promising to get sorer, and by the dowager’s declaration, he was to come back for a second try tomorrow, a situation into which he seemed to have opened a door that couldn’t be shut again.

He followed all the way up the steps to the balcony of Ilisidi’s apartment, that being the only way up into the castle he knew, while the dowager, on her way into her inner apartments, paid not the least further attention to his being there–which was not the rudeness it would have been among humans: it only meant the aiji‑dowager was disinterested to pursue business further with an inferior. At their disparity of rank she owed him nothing; and in that silence, he was free to go, unless some servant should deliver him some instruction to the contrary.

None did. He trailed through the dowager’s doorway, and on through the public reception areas of her apartment, tagged all the way by her lesser servants, who opened the outermost doors for him and bowed and wished him good fortune in his day as he left.

Good fortune, he wished them, in his turn, with appropriate nods and bows on their part, after which he trekked off down the halls, bruised and damaged, but with a knowledge now of the land, the provinces, the view and the command of the castle, and even what was the history and origin of the cannon he could see through the open front doors.

Where–God help him–several vehicles were parked.

Perhaps some official had come up from the township. Perhaps the promised repair crew had arrived and they were putting the electricity back in service. In any event, the paidhi wasn’t a presence most provincial atevi would take without flinching. He decided to hurry, and traversed the front room at a fast, sore‑legged walk.

Straight into an inbound group of the castle staff and a flock of tourists.

A child screamed, and ducked behind its parents. Parents stood stock still, a black wall with wide yellow eyes. He made an apologetic and sweeping bow, and–it was the paidhi’s minimal job–knew he had to patch the damage, wild as he must look, with a cut lip, and dust on his coat.

“Welcome to Malguri,” he said. “I’d no idea there were visitors. Please reassure the young lady.” A pause for breath. A second bow. “The paidhi, Bren Cameron, at your kind disposal. May I do you any grace?”

“May we have a ribbon?” an older boy was forward to ask.

“I don’t know that I have ribbons,” he said. He did, sometimes, have them in his office for formalities. He didn’t know whether Jago had brought such things. But one of the staff said they could procure them, and wax, if he had his seal‑ring.

He was trapped. Banichi was going to kill him.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve just come in from the stable court. I need to wash my hands. I’ll be right back down. Excuse me, give you grace, thank you…” He bowed two and three times more and made the stairs, was halfway up them when he looked up.

Tano was standing at the top of the stairs with no pleased expression on his face, a gun plainly on his hip. Tano beckoned him to come upstairs, and he ran the rest of the steps, the whole transaction between them at such an angle, he hoped, that the tourists couldn’t see the reason for his sudden burst of energy.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Tano said severely. “You were to use the back hall.”

“No one told me, nadi!” He was furious. And held his temper. The culprit was Banichi, who was in charge–and the second party responsible was clearly himself. “I need to clean up. I’ve promised these people–”

“Ribbons, nand’ paidhi. I’ll see to it. Hurry.”

He flew up the stairs past Tano, aches and all, down the hall to his apartment, with no time to bathe. He only washed, flung on fresh shirt and trousers, a clean coat, and passed cologne‑damp hands over his windblown hair, which was coming out of its braid.

Then he stalked out and down the hall, and made a more civilized descent of the stairs to what had been set up as a receiving line, a place ready at the table in the hall in front of the fireplace, with wax‑jack, with ribbons, with small cards, and an anxious line of atevi–for each of them, a card to sign, ribbon and seal with wax, and, with the first such signature and seal, a pleased and nervous tourist who’d received a bonus for his trip, while a line of thirty more waited, stealing glances past one another at the only living human face they’d likely seen, unless they’d been as far as Shejidan.

The paidhi was used to adult stares. The children were far harder to deal with. They’d grown up on machimi about the War. Some of them were sullen. Others wanted to touch the paidhi’s hand to see if his skin was real. One asked him if his mother was that color, too. Several were afraid of his eyes, or asked if he had a gun.

“No, nadi,” he lied to them, with mostly a clear conscience, “no such thing. We’re at peace now. I live in the aiji’s house.”

A parent asked, “Are you on vacation, nand’ paidhi?”

“I’m enjoying the lake,” he said, and wondered if his attempted assassination was on the television news yet, in whatever province the man came from. “I’m learning to ride.” He poured wax and sealed the ribbon to the card. “It’s a beautiful view.”

Thunder rumbled. The tourists looked anxiously to the door.

“I’ll hurry,” he said, and began to move the line faster, recalling the black cloud that they had seen from the ridge, down over the end of the lake–the daily deluge, he said to himself, and wondered whether it was the season and whether perhaps there was a reason why Tabini came here in the autumn, and not mid‑summer. Perhaps Tabini knew better, and sent the paidhi here to be drowned.

The electricity was still off. “It looks so authentic,” one visitor said to another, regarding the candlelight.

Tour the bathrooms, he thought glumly, and longed for the hot bath that would take half an hour at least to heat. He felt the least small discomfort sitting on the hard chair, that had everything to do with the riding‑pad and Nokhada’s gait, and the stretching of muscles in places he’d been unaware separate muscles existed.

A humid, cold gust of wind swept in the open front doors, fluttering the candles and making a sputter of wax from the wax‑jack that sprinkled the polished wood of the table. He thought of calling out to the staff to shut the door before the rain hit, but they were all out of convenient range, and he was almost finished. The tourists would be outbound in only another moment or two, and the door was providing more light to the room than the candles did.

Thunder boomed, echoing off the walls, and he was down to the last two tourists, an elderly couple who wanted “Four cards, if the paidhi would, for the grandchildren.”

He signed and sealed, while the tourists with their ribboned cards were congregating by the open doors. The vans were pulling around, and the air smelled like rain, sharp contrast to the smell of sealing‑wax.

He made an extra card, his last ribbon, for the old man, who told him his grandchildren were Nadimi and Fari and Tabona and little Tigani, who had just cut her first teeth, and his son Fedi was a farmer in Didaini province, and would the paidhi mind a picture?

He stood, feeling the stretch of stiffening muscles, he smiled at the camera, and at the general click of shutters as others took it for permission. He felt much better about the meeting, encouraged that the tourists proved approachable, even the children behaving far more easily toward him. It was the closest he supposed he’d ever come to meeting ordinary folk, except the very few he met in audience in Shejidan, and in the success of the gesture and in the habits of his job he felt constrained to a reciprocal courtesy, seeing them to the doors and onto their buses–always good policy, the extra gesture of good will, despite the chill; and he liked the old couple, who were following at his elbow and asking him about his family. “No, I don’t have a wife,” he said, “no, I’ve thought about it–”

Barb would die of boredom and frustration, in the cloister the paidhi lived in. Barb would stifle in the surrounding security, and as for being circumspect–her life wouldn’t tolerate the board’s questions, she wouldn’t pass

… and Barb… he didn’t love her, but she was what he needed.

A boy crowded near him, right up against his arm, and said, not too discreetly, “I’m that tall, look.” Which was the truth. But his parents hastily snatched him away, declaring that that was a very insheibi thing to say, very indiscreet, rude and dangerous, and begging the paidhi’s pardon could they possibly take a picture with him if a member of the paidhi’s staff could possibly snap the shutter?

He smiled, atevi‑style, waited while they arranged the shot, and looked civilized and as comfortable as possible, standing with the couple as the camera clicked.

More cameras went off, the moment he stepped away, a veritable barrage of shutters.

And a random three pops outside the open doors. He turned in a heart‑frozen shock, recognizing the sound of gunfire, as someone grabbed him by the arm and slammed him against the open door–as the tourists all rushed out under the portico in the rain.

Another shot rang out. The tourists cheered.

It was Tano half‑smothering him, when he hadn’t even known Tano was close. “Stay here,” Tano said, and went outside, his hand on his gun.

He couldn’t stand there not knowing what was happening, or what the danger was. He risked a glance after Tano’s departing back, keeping the rest of him behind the substantial door. He saw, in the gaps of a screen of tourists, a man lying on the pavings out in the rain, and at the same remove, atevi figures coming from the lawn to the circular drive, near the cannon, mere shadows through the veils of rain. A bus driver, ignoring the whole affair, was shouting for his tourists to get aboard, that they had a long drive today, and a schedule for lunch on the lake, if the weather passed.

The tourists boarded, while the atevi shadows stood around the man lying on the cobbles. He supposed the shooting was over. He came out and stood in front of the door as the damp gusts hit him. Tano came back in haste.

“Get inside, nand’ paidhi,” Tano said. The first van was moving out, tourists pressing their faces to the windows, a few waving. He waved back, helpless habit, frozen by the grotesqueness of the sight. The van made the circular drive past the cannon and the second bus passed him.

“It’s handled, nand’ paidhi, get inside. They think it was machimi for the tourists, it’s all right.”

“All right?” He held his indignation in check and steadied his voice. “Who’s been killed? Who is it?”

“I don’t know, nand’ paidhi, I’ll try to find out, but I can’t leave you down here. Please go upstairs.”

“Where’s Banichi?”

“Out there,” Tano said. “Everything’s all right, nadi, come, I’ll take you to your rooms.” Tano’s pocket‑com sputtered, and Tano turned it on, one‑handed. “I have him,” Tano said. It was Banichi’s voice, Bren thought, thank God it was Banichi, but where was Jago? He heard Banichi saying something in verbal code, about a problem solved, and then another voice–telling gender with atevi voices wasn’t always easy–saying something about a second team and that being all right.

“The dowager,” Bren said in a low voice, suddenly asking himself–one had to ask, with the evidence of death on the grounds–was Ilisidi somehow involved, was she all right, was she somehow the author of what was happening out there, with Banichi?

“Perfectly safe,” Tano said, and gave him another gentle shove. “Please, nadi, Banichi’s fine, everyone is fine–”

“Who’s dead? An outsider? Someone on staff?”

“I’m not quite sure,” Tano said, “but please, nadi, don’t make our jobs more difficult.”

He let himself be maneuvered away from the doors, then, away from the blowing mist that made his clothing damp and cold, and across the dim hall and up the stairs. All the while he was thinking about the shadows in the rain, about Banichi out there, and someone lying dead on the cobbled drive, right by the flower beds and the memorial cannon–

Thinking uneasily, too, about the alarm last night, and about riding up on the ridge not an hour ago, with Ilisidi and Cenedi, where any rifle might have picked them off. The vivid memory came back, of that night in Shejidan, and the shock of the gun in his hands, and Jago saying, like a bad dream, that there was blood on the terrace. Like outside, on the lawn, in the rain.

His knees started shaking as he climbed the stairs to the upper hall. His gut was upset before he reached the doors to his apartment, as if it were that night, as if everything was slipping again out of his control.

Tano strode two steps ahead of him at the last and opened the door to his receiving room, to what should feel like refuge, where warm air met him like a wall and light flooded in from a window blind with rain. Lightning flashed, making the window white for an instant. The tourists were having a rain‑drenched ride down the mountain. Their lunch on the lake seemed uncertain.

Someone had invaded the grounds last night and that someone was dead on the drive, all his plans cancelled. It hardly seemed reasonable that no one knew what they were.

Tano rang for the other servants, and assured him in a low voice that hot tea was forthcoming. “A bath,” Bren said, “if they can.” He didn’t want to deal with Djinana and Maigi right now, he wanted Tano, he wanted people he knew were Tabini’s–but he was scared to protest that to Tano, as if a question to their plans could turn into a challenge to their conspiracy of silence, a sign that the prisoner had gained the spirit to rebel, a warning that his guards should be more careful–

Another stupid thought. Banichi and Jago were the ones he wanted near him, and Tano had said it, his personal needs could only hinder whatever investigation Banichi was pursuing out there. He didn’t need to know on the same level that Banichi needed to be following that trail in the rain, needed to be asking questions among the staff, like how that person had gotten in or whether he had come with the bus or whether Banichi had somehow made a terrible mistake and it was just some poor, mistaken tourist out on the lawn for a special camera angle.

The people on the bus would miss one of their own number, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t one or the other busloads be asking why a seat was vacant, or who that had been, or had it all been machimi, just an actor, all along, an entertainment for their edification? Wasn’t it historic, and educational, here at Malguri, where fatal accidents happened on the walks?

Djinana and Maigi were quick to answer his summons, and hastened him out of Tano’s care and into the drawing room in front of the fire–peeling him out of his damp coat as they went and asking him how breakfast had gone with the dowager… as if no tourists had come in, as if nothing was going on out there, with any possible relevancy to anyone’s life–

Where was Algini? he suddenly wondered. He hadn’t seen Tano’s partner since yesterday, and someone was dead out there. He hadn’t seen Algini last night, just shadows passing through his room. He hadn’t seen Algini maybe since the day before… what with the incident with the tea, he’d lost his sense of time since he’d left Shejidan,

Tano hadn’t looked worried. But atevi didn’t always express things with their faces. Didn’t always express whal they felt, if they felt, and you didn’t know…

“Start the heater,” Maigi said to Djinana, and flung a lap‑robe about him. “Nadi, please sit down and stay warm. I’ll help you with the boots.”

He eased down into the chair in front of the fire, while Maigi tugged the boots off. His hands were like ice. His feet were chilled, for no good reason at all. “Someone was shot outside,” he said in a sudden reckless mood, challenging Maigi’s silence on the matter. “Do you know that?”

“I’m sure everything’s taken care of.” Maigi knelt on the carpet, warming his right foot with vigorous rubbing. “They’re very good.”

Banichi and Jago, Maigi seemed to mean. Very good. A man was dead. Maybe it was over, and he could go back tomorrow, where his computer would work and his mail would come.

With the electricity still out, and tourists coming and going, and the dowager exposing all of them to danger on a morning ride?

Why hadn’t Banichi interposed some warning, if Banichi had any warning there was someone loose on the grounds, and why hadn’t Banichi’s warning gotten to him about the tourists?

Or hadn’t Jago said something to him, yesterday–something about a tour,–but he hadn’t remembered, dammit, he’d been thinking about the other mess he’d gotten himself into, and it hadn’t stuck in his mind.

So it wasn’t their fault. Somebody had been chasing him, and he had walked in among the tourists, where someone else could have gotten shot–if his guards hadn’t, in the considerations of finesse, somehow protected him by being there.

He felt cold. Maigi tucked him into the chair with the robe and brought in hot tea. He sat with his robe‑wrapped feet propped in front of the fire, while the thunder boomed outside the window and the rain whipped at the glass, a level above the walls. The window faced the straight open sweep off the lake. It sounded like gravel pelting the glass. Or hail. Which made him wonder how the windows withstood it: whether they were somehow reinforced–and whether they were, considering the wall out there, and the chance of someone climbing it, also bulletproof.

Jago had wanted him clear of it, last night. Algini had disappeared, since before last night. The power had failed.

He sat there and kept replaying the morning in his head, the breakfast, the ride, Ilisidi and Cenedi, and the tourists and Tano, most of all the happy faces and the hands waving at him from the windows of the buses, as if everything was television, everything was machimi. He’d made a slight inroad into the country, met people he’d convinced not to be afraid of him, like the kids, like the old couple, and someone got shot right in front of them.

He’d fired a gun, he’d learned he would shoot to kill, for fear, for–he was discovering–for a terrible, terrible anger he had, an anger that was still shaking him–an anger he hadn’t known he had, didn’t know where it had started, or what it wanted to do, or whether it was directed at himself, or atevi, or any specific situation.

It hadn’t been a false alarm last night–or it was, Barb would say, one hell of a coincidence. Maybe Banichi had thought last night he was safe, and whoever it was had simply gotten that far within Banichi’s guard. Maybe they’d been tracking the assassin all along, and let him go off with Ilisidi this morning in the hope he’d draw the assassin out of cover.

Too much television, Banichi had said, that night with the smell of gunpowder in his room, and rain on the terrace. Too many machimi plays.

Too much fear in children’s faces. Too many pointing fingers.

He wanted his mail, dammit, he wanted just the catalogs, the pictures to look at. But they weren’t going to bring it.

Hanks might have missed him by now, tried to call his office and not gotten through.

On vacation with Tabini, they’d say. Hanks might know better. They monitored atevi transmissions. But they wouldn’t challenge the Bu‑javid on the point. They’d go on monitoring, once they were alert to trouble, trying to find him–and blame him for not doing his job. Hanks would start packing to assume his post. Hanks always had resented his winning it over her.

And Tabini would detest Hanks. He could tell the Commission that, if they didn’t think it self‑serving, and part of the feud between him and Hanks.

But if he was so damned good at predicting Tabini–or reading situations–he couldn’t prove it from where he sat now. He hadn’t made the vital call, he hadn’t put Mospheira alert to the situation–

God, that was stupid. He had the willies over some misguided lunatic and now he saw the Treaty collapsing, as if atevi had been waiting all these centuries only to resume the War, hiding a missile program they’d built on their own, launching warheads at Mospheira.

It was as stupid as atevi with their planet‑skimming satellites shooting death rays. Relations between Mospheira and Shejidan had bad periods. Tabini’s administration was the least secretive, the easiest to deal with of all the administrations they’d ever dealt with.

“Death rays,” Tabini would say, and laugh, invite him to supper and a private drink of the vice humans and atevi held in common. Laugh, Tabini would say. Bren, there are fools on Mospheira and fools in the Bu‑javid. Don’t take them seriously.

Steady hand, Bren‑ji, like pointing the finger, there’s no difference.

Good shot, good shot, Bren…

Rain… pelted the window. Washed evidence away. Buses rolled away down the road, the tourists laughed, amazed and amused by their encounter.

They hadn’t hated him. They’d wanted photographs to prove his existence to their neighbors…

“Nadi,” Djinana said, from the doorway. “Your bathwater’s ready.”

He gathered the fortitude to move, tucked his robe about him and went with Djinana through the bedroom, through the hall and the clammy accommodation, into the overheated air of the bath, where he could shed the blanket and the rest of his clothes, to sink neck‑deep into warm, steamy water.

Clouds rose around him. The water invaded the aches he wouldn’t admit to. He could lie and soak and stare stupidly at the ancient stonework around him–ask himself important questions such as why the tub didn’t fall through the floor, when the whole rest of the second floor was wood.

Or things like… why hadn’t the two staffs advised each other about the alarm last night, and why had Cenedi let them go out there?

They’d talked about cannon, and ancient wars.

Everything blurred. The stones, the precariousness, the age, the heat, the threat to his life. The storm noise didn’t get here. There was just the occasional shock of thunder through the stones, like ancient cannon shots.

And everyone saying, It’s all right, nand’ paidhi, it’s nothing for you to worry about, nand’ paidhi.

He heard footsteps somewhere outside. He heard voices that quickly died away.

Banichi coming back, maybe. Or Jago or Tano. Even Algini, if he was alive and well. Nothing in the house seemed to be an emergency. In the failure of higher technology, the methane burner worked.

The paidhi was used to having his welfare completely in others’ hands. There was nothing he could do. There was nowhere he could go.

He lay still in the water, wiggling his toes, which were cramped and sore from the boots, and ankles which were stiffening from the stress of staying on the mecheita’s back. He must have clenched his legs all the way. He sat there soaking away the aches until the water began to cool and finally climbed out and toweled himself dry–Djinana would gladly help him, but he had never had that habit with his own servants, let alone with strangers. Let alone here.

So he put on the dressing‑robe Djinana had laid out, and went back to the study to sit in front of his own safe fire, read his book and wait for information, or release, or hell to freeze over, whichever came first.

Maybe they’d caught the assassin alive. Maybe they were asking questions and getting answers. Maybe Banichi would even tell him if that was the case–

Or maybe not.

“When will we have power?” he asked Djinana, when Djinana came to ask if the paidhi wanted anything else. “Do they give any estimate?”

“Jago said something about ordering a new transformer,” Djinana said, “by train from Raigan. Something blew out in the power station between here and Maidingi. I don’t know what. The paidhi probably understands the systems far better than I do.”

He did. He hadn’t realized there was a secondary station. Nobody had said there was–only the news that a quarter of Maidingi was waiting on the same repair. It was logical a power station should attract lightning, but it wasn’t reasonable that no one within a hundred miles could bring power back to a major section of a township without parts freighted in.

“This isn’t a poor province. This has to happen from time to time. Does it happen every summer?”

“Oh, sometimes,” Djinana said. “Twice last.”

“Does it happen assassins get in? Does that happen?”

“Please be assured not, nand’ paidhi. And it’s all right now.”

“Is he dead? Do they know who he was?”

“I don’t know, nand’ paidhi. They haven’t told us. I’m sure they’re trying to find out. Don’t worry about such things.”

“I think it’s natural I worry about such things,” he muttered, looking at his book. And it wasn’t fair to take his frustration out on Djinana and Maigi, who only worked here, and who would take Malguri’s reputation very personally. “I would like tea, Djinana, thank you.”

“With sandwiches?”

“I think not, Djinana, thank you, no. I’ll sit here and read.”

There were ghost ships on the lake. One was a passenger ship that still made port on midwinter nights, once at Maidingi port itself, right under the lights, and tried to take aboard the unwary and the deservedly damned, but only a judge‑magistrate had gone aboard, a hundred years ago, and it had never made port again.

There was a fishing boat which sometimes appeared in storms–once, not twenty years ago, it had appeared to the crew of a stranded net‑fisher that was taking on water and sinking. All but two had gone aboard, the captain and his son electing to stay with their crippled trawler. The fishing boat, which everyone had remarked to be old and dilapidated, had sailed away with the crew, never to be seen again.

Everything in the legends seemed to depend on misplaced trust, though atevi didn’t quite have the word for it: ghosts lost all power if the victims didn’t believe what they saw, or if they knew things were too good to be true, and refused to deceive themselves.

Banichi still hadn’t come back. Maigi and Djinana came asking what he wanted for dinner, and recommended a game course, a sort of elusive, cold‑blooded creature he didn’t find appetizing, though he knew his servants thought it a delicacy. He asked for shellfish, instead, and Maigi thought that easy, though, Djinana said, the molluscs might not be the best this time of year: they would send down to town and they might have them, but it might be two or three hours or so before they could present them.

“Waiting won’t matter,” he said, and added, “they might lay in some more for lunch tomorrow.”

“There’s no ice,” Djinana said apologetically.

“Perhaps in town.”

“One could find out, nadi. But a great deal of the town is without power, and most houses will buy it up for their own stock. We’ll inquire…“

“No, no, nadi, please.” He survived on shellfish, in seasons of desperation. “Others doubtless need the ice. And if they can’t preserve it–please, take no chances. If the household could possibly arrange to find me fruited toast and tea, that would do quite well. I’ve no real appetite this evening.”

“Nadi, you must have more than toast and tea. You missed lunch.”

“Djinana‑nadi, I must confess, I find the season’s dish very strong… a difference in perceptions. We’re quite sensitive to alkaloids. There may be some somewhere in the preparations, and it’s absolutely essential I avoid them. If there were any kabiu choice of fruit or vegetables… The dowager‑aiji had very fine breakfast rolls, which I very much favor.”

“I’ll most certainly tell the cook. And–” Djinana had a most conspiratorial look. “I do think there’s last month’s smoked joint left. It’s certainly not un‑kabiu , if it’s left over. And we always put by several.”

Preserved meat. Out of season, God save them.

“We never know how many guests,” Djinana said, quite straight‑faced. “We’d hate to run short.”

“Djinana‑nadi, you’ve saved my life.”

Djinana was highly amused, very pleased with their solution, and bowed twice before leaving.

Whereupon, for the rest of the afternoon, he went back to his ghost ships, and his headless captains of trawlers that plied Malguri shores during storms. A bell was said to ring in the advent of disasters.

Instead there was an opening of the door, a squishing of wet boots across the drawing room, and a very wet and very tired‑looking Banichi, who walked into the study, and said, “I’ll join you for dinner, nadi.”

He snapped his book shut, and thought of saying that most people waited to be asked, that he hadn’t had any courtesy and that he was getting damned tired of being walked past, ignored, talked down to and treated in general like a wayward child.

“Delighted to have company,” he said, and persuaded himself he really was glad to have someone to talk to. “Tell Djinana to set another place.–Is Jago coming?”

“Jago’s on her way to Shejidan.” Banichi’s voice floated back to him from the bedroom, as he headed for the servants’ quarters and the bath. “She’ll be back tomorrow.”

He didn’t even ask why. He didn’t ask why a plane bothered to take off in the middle of a thunderstorm, the second since noon, when it was presumably the aiji’s plane, and could observe any schedule it liked. Banichi disappeared into the back hall, and after a while he heard water running in the bath. The boiler must still be up. Banichi didn’t have to wait for his bath.

As for himself, he went back to his ghost bells and his headless victims, and the shiploads of sailors lost to the notorious luck of Maidingi, which always fed on the misfortune of others when an aiji was resident in Malguri.

That was what the book said; and atevi, who believed in no omnipotent gods, who saw the universe and its quasi god‑forces as ruled by baji and naji , believed at least that naji could flow through one person to the next–or they had believed so, before they became modern and cynical and enlightened, and realized that superior firepower could redistribute luck to entirely undeserving people.

He had sat about in the dressing‑robe all afternoon, developing sore spots in very private areas. He declined to move, much less to dress for dinner, deciding that if Banichi had invited himself, Banichi could certainly tolerate his informality.

Banichi himself showed up in the study merely in black shirt, boots, and trousers, somewhat more formal, but only just, without a coat, and with his braid dripping wet down his back. “Paidhi‑ji,” Banichi said, bowing, and, “Have a drink,” Bren said, since he was indulging, cautiously, in a before‑dinner drink from his own stock, which he knew was safe. He did have a flask of Dimagi, which he couldn’t drink without a headache, and eventual more serious effects, very excellent Dimagi, he supposed, since Tabini had given it to him, and he poured a generous glass of that for Banichi.

“Nadi,” Banichi said, taking the glass with a sigh, and invited himself to sit by the fire in the chair angled opposite to his.

“So?” The liquor stung his cut lip. “A man’s dead. Was he the same one who invaded my bedroom?”

“We can’t be sure,” Banichi said.

“No strayed tourist.”

“No tourist at all. Professional. We know who he is.”

“And still no filing?”

“A very disturbing aspect of this business. This man was licensed. He had everything to lose by doing what he did. He’ll be stricken from the rolls, he’ll be denied benefits of the profession, his instructors will be disgraced. These are no small matters.”

“Then I feel sorry for his instructors,” Bren said.

“So do I, nadi. They were mine.”

Dead stop, on that point. Banichi–and this unknown man–had a link of some kind? Fellow students?

“You know him?”

“We met frequently, socially.”

“In Shejidan?”

“A son of distinguished family.” Banichi took a sip and stared into the fire. “Jago is escorting the remains and the report to the Guild.”

Not a good day, Bren decided, having lost all appetite for supper. Banichi regarded him with a flat, dark stare that he couldn’t read–not Banichi’s opinion, nor what obligation Banichi had relative to Tabini versus his Guild or this man, nor where the man’chi lay, now.

“I’m very sorry,” was all he could think to say.

“You have a right to retaliate.”

“I don’t want to retaliate. I never wanted this quarrel, Banichi.”

“They have one now.”

“With you?” He grew desperate. His stomach was upset. His teeth ached. Sitting was painful. “Banichi, I don’t want you or Jago hurt. I don’t want anybody killed.”

“But they do, nadi. That’s abundantly clear. A professional agreed with them enough to disregard Guild law–for man’chi , nadi. That’s what we have to trace–to whom was his man’chi ? That’s all that could motivate him.”

“And if yours is to Tabini?”

Banichi hesitated in his answer. Then, somberly: “That makes them highly unwise.”

“Can’t we arrest them? They’ve broken the law , Banichi. Don’t we have some recourse to stop this through the courts?”

“That,” Banichi said, “would be very dangerous.”

Because it wouldn’t restrain them. He understood that. It couldn’t legally stop them until there was a judgment in his favor.

“All they need claim is affront,” Banichi said, “or business interests. And how can you defend anything? No one understands your associations. The court hardly has a means to find them out.”

“And my word is worth nothing? My man’chi is to Tabini, the same as yours. They have to know that.”

“But they don’t know that,” Banichi said. “Even I don’t know that absolutely, nadi. I know only what you tell me.”

He felt quite cold, quite isolated. And angry. “I’m not a liar. I am not a liar, Banichi. I didn’t contest with the best my people have for fifteen years to come here to lie to you.”

“For fifteen years.”

“To be sent to Shejidan. To have the place I have. To interpret to atevi. I don’t lie, Banichi!”

Banichi looked at him a long, silent moment. “Never? I thought that was the paidhl’s job.”

“Not in this.”

“How selective dare we be? When do you lie?”

“Just find out who hired him.”

“No contract could compel his action.”

“What could?”

Banichi didn’t answer that question. Banichi only stared into the fire.

“What could , Banichi?”

“We don’t know a dead man’s thoughts. I could only wish Cenedi weren’t so accurate.”

“Cenedi shot him.” So Cenedi and Ilisidi’s loyalties at least were accounted for. He was relieved.

But Banichi didn’t seem wholly pleased with Cenedi. Or, at least, with the outcome. Banichi took a sip of the drink warming in his hands and never looked away from the fire.

“But you’re worried,” Bren said.

“I emphatically disapprove these delivery vehicles. This is an unwarrantable risk. The tourists at least have a person counting heads.”

“You think that’s how he got in?”

“Very possible.”

“They’re not going to continue the tours. Are they?”

“People have had their reservations for months. They’d be quite unhappy.”

Sometimes he ran straight up against atevi mindset in ways he didn’t understand. Or expect.

“Those people were in danger, Banichi!”

“Not from him or us.”

Finesse. Biichi‑ji .

“There were children in that crowd. They saw a man shot.”

Banichi looked at him as if waiting for the concluding statement that would make sense. As if they had totally left the subject.

“It’s not right, Banichi. They thought it was a machimi! They thought it was television!”

“Then they were hardly offended. Were they?”

Before he could follow that line of reasoning, Djinana and Maigi arrived down the inner hall with the dinner cart.

With a selection of dishes, the seasonal and slices from the leftover joint. Banichi’s eyes brightened at the offering, as they seated themselves in the dining room and the covers came off the dishes. State of mourning or murderous intent, Banichi had no hesitation in loading his plate, and no diminution of appetite.

The cook had provided a selection of prepared fruits, very artistically arranged. That appealed. One could have exempted the prepared head of the unseasonal game as a cap for the stewpot, but Banichi lifted it by the ears and set it delicately aside, gratefully out of view behind the stewpot. Other dead animals stared down from the walls.

“This is excellent,” Banichi said.

Bren poked at the sliced meat. His nerves were jangled. The dining chair hurt. He took up his knife and cut a bite, trying to put ghost stories and assassins out of his mind. He found the first taste excellent, and helped himself to the sliced meat and a good deal of the spicy sauce he enjoyed over the vegetables.

“Is there,” he asked, in the lull eating made, “possibly any word on my mail? I know you’ve had your hands full, but–”

“I have, as you quaintly express it, had my hands full. Perhaps Jago will remember to check the post.”

“You could call her.” Temper flared up. Or a sense of muddled desperation. “Has anyone explained to my office where I am, or why?”

“I frankly don’t know that, paidhi‑ji.”

“I want you to convey a message to them. I want you to patch me through on your communications. I know you can do that, from the security station.”

“Not without clearance. It’s a public move, if the paidhi takes to our security channels. You understand the policy statement that would make, absolute encouragement to your detractors and Tabini’s.”

“What happened to security?”

“Courier is still far better. Far better, nadi. Prepare your statement. I’ll send it the next time one of us carries a report.”

Banichi didn’t refuse him. Banichi didn’t say no. But it kept coming out to procrastination, I forgot, and, There’s a reason.

He ate the rest of the meat course in silence, favoring his sore mouth.

And questions still nagged him.

“ Was it an accident, the power outage?”

“Most probably. To put a quarter of the homes in Maidingi township in the dark? Hardly the Guild’s style.”

“But you knew it last night. You knew someone was loose on the grounds.”

“I didn’t know. I suspected it. We had a perimeter alarm.”

Did we? he thought bitterly. And asked, instead: “ Where is Algini?”

“He’ll return with Jago.”

“Did he leave with Jago?”

“He took the commercial flight. Yesterday.”

“Carrying a report?”

“Yes.”

“For what ? Forgive my frankness, Banichi‑ji, but I don’t believe there’s any possible investigation to be done–to find the precise agency at work here, yes, but I don’t for a moment believe Tabini doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong and who’s behind it. I don’t believe you don’t know. I don’t believe you didn’t know where I was this morning.”

“Behind the ridge, mostly, for quite a while. I noticed your limping.”

Soreness didn’t help his mood. “You might have warned me.”

“Regarding what? That Ilisidi would go riding? She often does.”

“Dammit, if you’d told me there was the chance of a sniper, if you’d told me we’d be leaving the house, I might have come up with a reasonable objection.”

“You had a reasonable objection. You might have pleaded your recent indisposition. I doubt they would have carried you to the stables.”

“You didn’t tell me there was a danger!”

“There’s a constant danger, nadi.”

“Don’t shove me off, dammit. You let me go out there. It’s harder to find an excuse for tomorrow, when I’m also committed to go. And am I safe then ? I don’t always understand your sense of priorities, Banichi, and in this, I truly confess I don’t.”

“The tea was Ilisidi’s personal opportunity. And Cenedi was with us last night, during the search. Cenedi would have taken me if he’d intended to. I made that test.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “You mean you gave Cenedi a chance to kill you?”

“When you will make promises to strangers without consulting me, paidhi‑ji, you do make my job more difficult. Jago was advised of the situation. Possibly Cenedi knew it, and knew that he had Jago yet to deal with, but Cenedi is not contracted against you, I made amply certain of that. And I was between you and the estate at all times this morning.”

“Banichi, I apologize. Profoundly.”

Banichi shrugged. “Ilisidi is an old and clever woman. What did you talk about? The weather? Tabini?”

“Breakfast. Not breaking my neck. A mecheita called Babs–”

“Babsidi.” It meant ‘lethal.’ “And nothing else?”

He desperately tried to remember. “How it was her land. What plants grow here. Dragonettes.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Nothing of consequence. Cenedi talked about the ruin up there, and the cannon on the front lawn. –She ran me up a hill, I cut my lip… after that they were polite to me. And the tourists were polite to me. I gave them ribbons and signed their cards and we talked about families and where they came from.–Was either one a disaster, Banichi‑ji–before some fool tried to cross the lawn? Advise me. I am asking for advice.”

Another of Banichi’s long, sober stares. Banichi’s eyes were the clearest, incredible yellow. Like glass. Just as expressive. “We’re both professionals, paidhi‑ji. You are quite good.”

“You think I’m lying?”

“I mean that you’re no more off duty than I am.” Banichi lifted the flask and poured moderately for them both. “I have confidence in your professional instincts. Have confidence in mine.”

It came down to the fruit, and a creme and liqueur sauce. A man could be seduced by that, if his stomach weren’t uncertain from dinner conversation.

“If you’re running courier,” Bren said, when the atmosphere felt easier, “you can handle a written dispatch from me to my office on Mospheira.”

“We might,” Banichi said. “If Tabini approves.”

“Any word about that solar unit I wanted?”

“I’m afraid they’re prioritied, if they can find one. We’ve donated the generator we have. We have homes in the valley without power, elderly and ill persons–”

“Of course.” He couldn’t fault that answer. It was entirely reasonable. Everything was.

Confidence, Bren said to the creatures on the wall. Patience. Glass eyes stared back at him, some angry, some placidly stupid, having awaited their hunters with equanimity, one supposed.

Banichi said he had business to attend–reports to write. In longhand, one supposed.

Or not. Djinana came and took the dishes away, and lit the oil lamps, having blown out the candelabra in the dining room.

“Will you need anything more?” Djinana asked; and, “No,” Bren said, thinking to himself that of individuals who didn’t get regular hours or a fair explanation around this place, Djinana was chief. One wondered where Tano was–Tano, who was supposed to be his personal staff. While Algini was off in Shejidan. “I’m sure I won’t. I’ll read until bedtime.”

“I’ll lay out your night things,” Djinana said.

“Thank you,” he murmured, and picked up his book and took the chair by the fire, where, if he sat at an angle, with the lamps on the table beside him, the two light sources made reading at least moderately possible. Live flame flickered. He had discovered that primary good reason for light bulbs.

Djinana whisked the cart away with the dishes–the man never so much as rattled a glass when he worked. The candles were out in the dining room, leaving it a dark cavern. Elsewhere the fire cast horned and large‑eared shadows about the room, and danced in the glass eyes of the beasts.

He heard Djinana open the armoire in the bedroom, and heard him go away again.

After that was a curious quiet about the place. No rain, no thunder, nothing but the crackle of the fire. He read, he turned pages–which sounded amazingly loud, on a rare romance in the histories, no one bent on feud, no inter‑clan struggles, no dramatic leaps from Malguri tower, and not a drowning to be had, just a romantic couple who met and courted at Malguri, who happened to be the aijiin of two neighboring provinces, and who had a plethora of talented children.

Pleasant thought, that someone who slept in these rooms hadn’t come to a bad end; interesting, to have a notion of romantic goings‑on, the gifts of flowers, the long and tender relationship of two people who, being heads of state, never quite had a domicile except Malguri, in the fall. It was a side of themselves atevi didn’t show to the paidhi–unless one counted flirtations he never knew whether he should take seriously. But that was how it went, a number of small gifts, tied to each other’s gates, or sent by third parties. Atevi marriages didn’t always mean cohabitation. Often enough they didn’t, except when there were minor children in question–and sometimes then cohabitation lasted and sometimes it didn’t. What atevi thought or what atevi felt still eluded him through the atevi language.

But he liked the aijiin of Malguri the way he’d liked the old couple with the grandchildren, touring together, he supposed, looking for adventures… maybe not cohabiting: nothing guaranteed that.

And long as paidhiin had been on the continent, they had discovered no graceful way to ask, through atevi reticence to discuss their living arrangements, their addresses, their routines or their habits–it all fell under ‘private business,’ and no one else’s.

He thought he might ask Jago. Jago at least found amusement in his rude questions. And Jago was amazingly well read. She might even know the historic couple.

He missed Jago. He wouldn’t have had a near‑fight with Banichi if Jago had been here. He didn’t know why Banichi had insisted on inviting himself to supper, if he had to spend it in a surly mood.

Something hadn’t gone well, perhaps.

In a day which had included Cenedi shooting a man and that man turning out to be one Banichi knew–damned right something hadn’t gone right today, and Banichi had every reason to be in a rotten state of mind. That atevi didn’t show it and habitually understated the case didn’t mean Banichi wasn’t upset–and didn’t mean Banichi might not himself wish Jago were here. He supposed Banichi hadn’t had a good time himself, having a surly human displaying an emotional load an atevi twelve‑year‑old wouldn’t own to.

He supposed he even owed Banichi an apology.

Not that he wanted to give one. Because he understood didn’t mean he was reconciled, and he wished twice over that Jago hadn’t gone to Shejidan today, Jago being just slightly the younger, a little more reticent, as he read her now, even shy, but just slightly more forthcoming than Banichi once she decided to talk, whether Jago was more so by nature or because Tabini’s man’chi didn’t lie lightly on anyone’s shoulders, least of all Banichi’s.

His eyes stung with reading in the flickering light; keeping the fire lively enough to cast light to the chair made the fireside uncomfortably warm, and the oil lamps made the air thick. He found himself with a mild headache, and got up and walked, quietly, so as not to disturb the staff, into the cooler part of the room–too restless to sleep, yet.

He missed his late‑night news. He missed being able to call Barb, or even, God help him, Hanks, and say the things he dared say over lines he knew were bugged. He was all but down to talking to himself, just to hear the sound of human language in the silence, to get away, however briefly, from immersion in atevi thoughts and atevi reasoning.

A motor started, somewhere. He stopped still and listened, decided someone was leaving the courtyard and going down to the town, or somewhere in between, and who that was, he had a fair notion.

Damn, he thought, and went to the window, but one couldn’t see the courtyard from there because of the sideways jut of the front hall. A pin held the latch of the side window panels, and he pulled that to see if he could tell whether the car was going down the main road or off into the hills, or whether he was about to trigger a nonhistorical security alarm by opening the latch.

Only the airline transport van, hell. Malguri had a van of its own. Food and passengers came up the road. They could have gotten him from the airport.

But Banichi had thought otherwise, perhaps. Perhaps he wanted to sound things out before relying on Cenedi.

Perhaps he still had his doubts.

The sound of the motor went up and around the walls.

He couldn’t tell. But the night air coming in was crisp and cold after the stuffiness of the room. He drew in a great breath and a second one.

First night he had been here that it hadn’t been raining, the first hour of full dark, and the sky above the lake and the mountains to the east were so clear and black and cold one could see Maudette aloft, faintly red, and Gabriel’s almost invisible companion, a real test of eyesight, on Mospheira.

The night air smelled wonderful, loaded with wildflowers, he supposed; and he hadn’t realized how he’d missed the garden outside his room; or how pent up he’d felt.

He’d been able, on clear nights on Mt. Allan Thomas, to see the station just around sunset or sunrise. He didn’t keep up with its schedule the way he had in his youth, when Toby and he had used to go hiking in the hills, when they’d used to tell stories about the Landing, and imagine–it was embarrassing, nowadays–that there were atevi guerrillas hiding in the high hills. They had used to have imaginary wars up there, shooting atevi by the hundreds, being shot at by fictitious atevi villains, about as good as the atevi machimi about secret human guerrillas supported by egomaniacs secretly concealing their base aboard the station… the Foreign Star, as atevi had called it in those long past and warlike days.

At least they’d achieved a common mythology, a common past, a common set of heroes and villains–and which was which only depending on point of view.

He never had mentioned to Tabini that his father was Polanski’s descendant several illegitimate generations down the line, the Polanski who’d generaled the standoff on Half Moon Beach, the one that had kept atevi reinforcements off Mospheira.

Nothing Poianski’s remote descendant had anything to do with–nothing, in his present job, that he wanted to admit to.

One made progress as one could. He wished atevi children didn’t see humans as shadow‑players and madmen; he wished human children didn’t play at shooting atevi in the woods. The idea came to him of making that a major theme in his winter speech to the assembly… but he didn’t know how one got at all the film and all the television on both sides which kept reinforcing it all.

But not totally smart, with realities as they were, to be standing with the fire at his back. Jago had pulled him away from this very window last night… a danger from the windows or the roof of the other wing seemed stupid. But anybody could have a boat on the lake, he supposed, though not close enough to give an assassin a good target. Anybody could land on Malguri’s shore, give or take the walls and the cliffs below the walls, which were formidable.

He stepped back and began to close the window. Lights flashed on all about him. An alarm began to ring as he blinked in the glare of electric light, and slammed the window shut and latched it, heart beating in utter startlement, with the sound of bare feet crossing the wooden floor of the next room.

Tano showed up, stark naked, gun in hand, Djinana close behind him, and Maigi after that, Maigi dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, with the thump of people running out in the halls, everywhere in Malguri, the alarm still sounding.

“Did you open a window?” Tano asked. “Nadiin, I did, I’m sorry.”

His rescuers drew a collective breath as the latch rattled in the next room, and Tano dismissed Djinana in that direction with a wave of his hand.

“Nadi, they’ve brought us on‑line again,” Tano said, “Your security had rather you not open the windows, for your own protection. Particularly at night.”

Djinana had let someone in from the outside hall. Cenedi showed up with Djinana and a couple of the dowager’s guard, to hear Tano say, “The paidhi opened the window, nadi.”

“Nand’ paidhi,” Cenedi said. “Please, hereafter, don’t.”

“I beg your pardons,” he said. The alarm was still going, jangling his nerves. “Can someone please turn off the alarm?”

Cenedi gave the orders. It still took time to sort out, and the oil lamps all had to be put out before he could get his rooms clear of staff.

He sank down on the side of his bed after the clatter and the commotion had died, after the doors and windows were shut, asking himself where Banichi had been and what black thoughts the dowager must be having about him at the moment.

Damned sloppy, having an alarm system down with the power. It wasn’t Banichi’s style. He didn’t think it was Cenedi’s. He didn’t think he’d seen everything that guarded Malguri. Solar‑batteried security, he’d bet on it. They had the technology.

It didn’t keep the paidhi from waking the house and looking like a fool.

It didn’t make Ilisidi happier with him. He could bet on that, too.

VIII

« ^ »

A noisy night,” Ilisidi said, pouring her own tea–the smell of it drifted with the steam, across the table, and Bren’s stomach went queasy.

“I’m extremely sorry,” he said, “and embarrassed, aiji‑mai.”

Ilisidi grinned, positively grinned, and added sugar.

It was little barbs all during breakfast. Ilisidi was in an excellent humor. She wolfed down four fish, a bowl of cereal and two cakes with sweet oil, while he stayed to the cereal and the breakfast rolls, thinking that, considering the pain he was in sitting on a hard chair this morning, he would almost rather drink Ilisidi’s tea than get onto Nokhada’s back again.

But it was downstairs, Ilisidi reveling in the stiff breeze blowing in off the lake, a breeze that tore at coat‑skirts and knifed right through sweaters when one passed out of the sunlight and into the stable court.

Nokhada at least was willing to get down for him this morning, and this time, at least, he was ready for the snap of Nokhada’s rising before he was quite astride.

It hurt. God, it hurt. Not exactly the kind of pain a man could admit to, or beg off from. He only hoped for early numbness, and told himself his human ancestors had been riders, and somehow continued the species.

He brought a quick stop to Nokhada’s milling about, determined to have the final word on their course this morning–which lasted until Ilisidi moved Babs out and Nokhada jostled Cenedi’s mecheita for position at Babs’ tail in a sudden dash out onto the road.

Straight out. Ilisidi and Babs vanished over the cliff, a stride or two before Nokhada won out over Cenedi’s mount and took the same downward plunge.

Onto what thank God was trail and not empty air.

He didn’t yell, and didn’t object, though his legs did, and for a moment the pain was acute, in a dozen jolting strides down a dusty slot of a trail that began above the point where Nokhada had thrown the fit yesterday about the rein.

If they had gone off then, they would not have fallen, damn the creature. Gone an embarrassing long distance down to a second terrace above the lake, indeed they would, but there was such a terrace, whether or not, yesterday, at the start of the ride, he might have had the ability to stay on Nokhada’s back.

And he found it equally interesting that, with the plunge over the cliff available for the novice fool, Ilisidi had taken them straight up the mountain yesterday, however rough the course. A second chance missed, then. So maybe the tea was, after all, an accident.

Although, given there had been an intruder on the grounds yesterday, maybe getting them over the ridge or above line‑of‑sight from the fortress had been a priority.

And given Banichi’s comment about having had them under direct surveillance…

“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday that there was a possibility of someone out there?” he asked Cenedi, with the rest of the dowager’s guard trailing behind. “You knew we were in danger yesterday. Banichi informed you.”

“The outriders,” Cenedi said, “were well alert. And Banichi was never far.”

“Nadi, a risk to the dowager? In all respect, is that reasonable?”

“With Tabini’s man?” Cenedi’s face had things in common with Banichi’s. Just as expressive. “No. It wasn’t a risk.”

Not a risk? A compliment to Banichi, perhaps, but damned well a risk, under any human interpretation of the word, unless, the thought that had jogged his attention last night, there were more security systems about than either Banichi or Cenedi was going to own to. He rode by Cenedi in thinking silence, with the waves lapping the rocks below. The sky was blue. The waters danced. A dragonette soared past Nokhada’s face and made her jump, a single heart‑stopping moment, close to the edge.

“Damn!” he said, and he and Nokhada had a silent war for a moment, at which Cenedi maintained complete lack of expression, and complete control of his mecheita.

Ilisidi rode ahead of them, oblivious, seemingly, to all of it. When he tilted his head back and looked up he couldn’t see the fortress walls at all, just the bowed face of the rocks and, behind them, the very edge of the modern wall that divided off the paved court from the trail. Ahead, the trail wound higher on the mountain, until they came to a promontory with a dizzying view, where Ilisidi stopped and let Babs stand, and where, when he arrived, he sat doing the same with Nokhada, telling himself that if Babs didn’t fling himself over the cliff, Nokhada wouldn’t, and he needn’t worry.

“Glorious day,” Ilisidi said.

“An unforgettable view,” he said, and thought that he never would forget it, the chanciness of their height, the power of the creature under him, the startling panorama of the lake spread out around them as far as the eye could see. skiing with Toby, he had had such sights, but never one fraught with atevi significances, never one once foreign and now freighted with names, and identity, and history. The Bu‑javid–with its pressures, its schedules, its crowds of political favor‑seekers–had no such views, no such absolute, breath‑taking moments as Malguri offered… between hours, as yesterday, of cloistered, stifling silence, headaches from oil‑burning lamps, cold, dark spots in the corners of cavernous halls and knees blistered from proximity to a waning fire.

Not to mention the plumbing.

But it had its charm. It had its moments, it had the incredible texture of life that didn’t measure by straight lines and standardized measures, that didn’t go by streets and straight edges, with people living stacked up on top of each other, and lights blotting out the stars at night. Here, one could hear the wind and the waves, one could find endless variety in weathered stones and pebbles and there was no schedule but the inescapable fact that riding out and riding back were the same distance…

Ilisidi talked about the trading ships and the fishermen, while the high, thin trail of a jet passed above Malguri on its way east, across the continental divide, across the barrier that had held two atevi civilizations from meeting for thousands of years–a matter of four, five hours, now, that easy. But Ilisidi talked about crossings of Maidingi that took days, and involved separate aijiin’s territory.

“In those days,” Ilisidi said, “one proceeded very carefully into the territory of foreign aijiin.”

Not without a point. Again.

“But we’ve learned so much more, nand’ dowager.”

“More than what?”

“That walling others out equally walls us in, nand’ dowager.”

“Hah,” Ilisidi declared, and with a move he never saw, spun Babs about and lit out along the hill, scattering stones.

Nokhada followed. All of them had to. And it hurt, God, it hurt when they struck the downhill to the lake. Ahead of them, Ilisidi, with her white‑shot braid flying–no ribbon of rank, no adornment, just a red and black coat, and Babsidi’s sleek black rump, tail switching for nothing more than excess energy–nothing more in Ilisidi’s mind, perhaps, than the free space in front of her.

Catching up was Nokhada’s idea; but with the rest of the guard behind, and Cenedi beside, there was nothing to do but follow.

At another time they stopped, on the narrow half‑moon of a sandy beach, where the lake curved in, and a man thinking of assassins could only say to himself that there were places on the shore where a boat could land and reach Malguri.

But standing while the mecheiti caught their breaths, Ilisidi talked about the lake, its depth, its denizens–its ghosts. “When I was a child,” she said, “a wreck washed up on the south shore, just the bow of it, but they thought it might be from a treasure ship that sank four hundred years ago. And divers went out for it, all up and down this shore. They say they never found it. But a number of antiquities turned up in Malguri, and the servants were cleaning them in barrels in the stable court, about that time. My father sent the best pieces to the museum in Shejidan. And it probably cost him an estate. But most people in Maidingi province would have melted them for the gold.”

“It’s good he saved them.”

“Why?”

“For the past,” he said, wondering if he had misunder stood something else in atevi mindset. “To save it. Isn’t that important?”

“Is it?” Ilisidi answered him with a question and left him none the wiser. She was off again up the hill, and he forgot all his philosophy, in favor of protecting what he feared might have progressed to blisters. Damn the woman, he thought, and thought that if he pulled up and lagged behind as long as he could hold Nokhada’s instincts in check, the dowager might take that for a surrender and slow down, but damned if he would, damned if he would cry help or halt. Ilisidi would dismiss him from her company then, probably lose all interest in him, and he could lie about in a warm bath, reading ghost stories until his would‑be assassins flung themselves against the barriers Banichi had doubtless set up, and killed themselves, and he could go home to air‑conditioning, the morning news, and tea he could trust. From moment to moment it seemed like the only escape.

But he kept Ilisidi’s pace. Atevi called it na’itada . Barb called it being a damned fool. He had never spent so long an hour as it took to get home again, an hour in which he told himself repeatedly he had rather fall off the mountain and be done.

Finally the gates of the stable court were in front of them, then behind them, with the mecheiti anxious for stables and grain. He managed to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, and climbed down off Nokhada’s towering height onto legs he wasn’t sure would bear his weight.

“A hot bath,” Ilisidi called out to him. “I’ll send you some herbs, nand’ paidhi. I’ll see you in the morning!”

He managed to bow, and, among Ilisidi’s entourage, to walk up the stairs without conspicuously limping.

“The soreness goes,” Cenedi said to him quietly, “in four or five days.”

A hot bath was all he was thinking of, all the long way up to the front hall. A hot bath, for about an hour. A soft and motionless chair. Soaking and reading seemed an excellent way to spend the remainder of the day, sitting in the sun, minding his own business, evading aijiin and their athletic endeavors. He limped down the long hall and started the stairs up to his floor, at his own pace.

Quick footsteps crossed the stone floor below the stairs. He looked back in some concern for his safety in the halls and saw Jago coming toward the stairs, all energy and anxiousness. “Bren‑ji,” she called out to him. “Are you all right?”

The limp showed. His hair was flying loose from its braid and there was dust and fur and spit on his coat. “Fine, nadi‑ji. Was it a good flight?”

“Long,” she said, overtaking him in a handful of double steps a human would struggle to make. “Did you fall, Bren‑ji? You didn’t fall off…”

“No, just sore. Perfectly ordinary.” He made a determined effort not to limp the rest of the way up the stairs, and went beside her down the hall… which was supposing she wanted the company of sweat and mecheita fur. Jago smelled of flowers, quite nicely so. He’d never noticed it before; and he was marginally embarrassed–not polite to sweat, the word had passed discreetly from paidhi to paidhi. Overheated humans smelled different, and different was not good with atevi, in matters of personal hygiene; the administration had pounded that concept into junior administrative heads. So he tried to keep as discreetly as possible apart from Jago, glad she was back, wishing he might have a chance for a bath before debriefing, and wishing most of all that she’d been here last night. “Where’s Banichi? Do you know? I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“He was down at the airport half an hour ago,” Jago said. “He was talking to some television people. I think they’re coming up here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, nadi. They came in on the flight. It could have to do with the assassination attempt. They didn’t say.”

Not his business, he concluded. Banichi would handle it with his usual discretion, probably put them on the next flight out.

“Not any other trouble here?”

“Only with Banichi.”

“How?”

“Just not happy with me. I seem to have done something or said something, nadi‑ji–I’m not even sure.”

“It isn’t a comfortable business,” Jago said, “to report an associate to his disgrace. Give him room, nand’ paidhi. Some things aren’t within your office.”

“I understand that,” he said, telling himself he hadn’t understood: he’d been unreasonably focussed on his own discomforts last night, to the exclusion of Banichi’s own reasonable distress. It began to dawn on him that Banichi might have wanted things of him he just hadn’t given, before they’d parted in discomfort with each other. “I think I was very rude last night, nadi. I shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t doing my job. I think he’s right to be upset with me. I hope you can explain to him.”

“You have no ‘job’ toward him, Bren‑ji. Ours is toward you. And I much doubt he took offense. If he allowed you to see his distress, count it for a compliment to you.”

Unusual notion. One part of his brain went ransacking memory, turning over old references. Another part went on vacation, wondering if it meant Banichi did after all like him.

And the sensible, workaday part of his brain told the other two parts to pay attention to business and quit expecting human responses out of atevi minds. Jago meant what Jago said, point, endit; Banichi let down his guard with him, Banichi was pissed about a dirty business, and neither Banichi nor Jago was suddenly, by being cooped up with a bored human, about to break out in human sentiment. It wasn’t contagious, it wasn’t transferable, and probably he frustrated hell out of Banichi, too, who’d just as busily sent him clues he hadn’t picked up on. As a dinner date, he’d been a dismal substitute for Jago, who’d been off explaining to the Guild why somebody wanted to kill the paidhi; and probably by the end of the evening, Banichi had ideas of his own why that could be.

They reached the door. He had his key from his pocket, but Jago was first with hers, and let them into the receiving room.

“So glum,” she said, looking back at him. “Why, nand’ paidhi?”

“Last night. We were saying things–I wished I hadn’t. I wish I’d said I was sorry. If you could convey to him that I am…”

“Said and did aren’t even brothers,” Jago said. She pulled the door to, pocketed her key and took the portfolio from under her arm. “This should cheer you. I brought your mail.”

He’d given up. He’d accepted that it wasn’t going to get through security; and Jago threw over all his suppositions about his situation in Malguri.

He took the bundle she handed him and sorted through it, not even troubling to sit down in his search for personal mail.

It was mostly catalogs, not nearly so many as he ordinarily got; three letters, but none from Mospheira–two from committee heads in Agriculture and Finance, and one with Tabini’s official seal.

It wasn’t all his mail, not, at least, his ordinary mail–nothing from Barb or his mother. No communication from his office, messages like, Where are you? Are you alive?

Jago surely knew what was missing. She had to know, she wasn’t that inefficient. And what did he say about it? She stood there, waiting, probably in curiosity about Tabini’s letter.

Or maybe knowing very well what was in it.

He began to be scared of the answers–scared of his own ignorance and his own failure to figure out what the silence around him was saying, or what of Tabini’s signals he was supposed to have picked up.

He ran his thumbnail under the seal on Tabini’s letter, hoping for rescue, hoping it held some sort of explanation that didn’t add up to disaster.

Tabini’s handwriting–was not the clearest hand he had ever dealt with. The usual declaration of titles. I hope for your health , it began, with Tabini’s calligraphic flourish. I hope for your enjoyment of Malguri’s resources of sun and water .

Thanks, Tabini, he thought sourly, thanks a lot. The rainy season, no less. He rested a sore backside against the table to read it, while Jago waited.

Something about television. Television , for God’s sake.

… my intention by this interview to give people around the world an exposure to human thought and appearance far different than the machimi have presented. I feel this is a useful opportunity which should not be wasted, and have great confidence in your diplomacy, Bren. Please be as frank with these professionals as you would be with me, privately .

“Nadi Jago. Do you know what’s in this?”

“No, Bren‑ji. Is there a problem?”

“Tabini’s sent the television crew!”

“That would explain the people on the flight. I am surprised we weren’t advised. Though I’m sure they have credentials.”

Under the circumstances which have made advisable your isolation from the City and its contacts, I can think of no more effective counter to your enemy than the cultivation of increased public favor. I have spoken personally to the head of news and public awareness at the national network, and authorized a reputable and highly regarded news crew to meet with you at Malguri, for an interview which may, in my hopes and those of the esteemed lord Minister of Education, lead to monthly news conferences…

“He wants me to do a monthly news program! Do you know about this?”

“I plead not, nadi‑ji. I’m sure, however, if Tabini‑aiji has cleared these individuals to speak to you, they’re very reputable people.”

“Reputable people.” He scanned the letter for more devastating news, found only I know the weather in this season is not the best, but I hope that you have found pleasure in the library and accommodation with the esteemed aiji‑dowager, to whom I hope you will convey my personal good wishes .

“This is impossible. I have to talk to Tabini.–Jago, I need a phone. Now.”

“I’ve no authorization, Bren‑ji. There isn’t a phone here, and I’ve no authorization to remove you from our–”

“The hell, Jago!”

“I’ve no authorization, Bren‑ji.”

“Does Banichi?”

“I doubt so, nadi‑ji.”

“Well, neither do I. I can’t talk to these people.”

Jago’s frown grew anxious. “The paidhi tells me that Tabini‑aiji has authorized these people. If Tabini‑aiji has authorized this interview, the paidhi is surely aware that it would be a very great embarrassment to these people and their superior, extending even to the aiji’s court. If the paidhi has any authorization in this letter to refuse this, I must ask to see this letter.”

“It’s not Tabini. I’ve no authorization from Mospheira to do any interview. I absolutely can’t do this without contacting my office. I certainly can’t do it on any half‑hour notice. I need to contact my office. Immediately.”

“Is not your man’chi to Tabini? Is this not what you said?”

God, right down the predictable and unarguable slot.

“My man’chi to Tabini doesn’t exclude my arguing with him or my protecting my position of authority among my own people. It’s my obligation to do that, nadi‑ji. I have no force to use. It’s all on your side. But my man’chi gives me the moral authority to call on you to do my job.”

The twists and turns of a trial lawyer were a necessary part of the paidhi’s job. But persuading Jago to reinterpret man’chi was like pleading a brief against gravity.

“Banichi would have to authorize it,” Jago said with perfect composure, “if he has the authority, which I don’t think he does, Bren‑ji. If you wish me to go down to the airport, I will tell him your objection, though I fear the television crew will come when their clearance says to come, which may be before any other thing can be arranged, and I cannot conceive how Tabini could withdraw a permission he seems to have granted without–”

“I feel faint. It must be the tea.”

“ Please , nadi, don’t joke.”

“I can’t deal with them!”

“This would reflect very badly on many people, nadi. Surely you understand–”

“I cannot decide such policy changes on my own, Jago! It’s not in the authority I was given–”

“Refusal of these people must necessarily have far‑reaching effect. I could not possibly predict, Bren‑ji, but can you not comply at least in form? This surely won’t air immediately, and if there should be policy considerations, surely there could be ameliorations. Tabini has recommended these people. Reputations are assuredly at stake in this.”

Jago was no mean lawyer herself–versed in man’chi and its obligations, at least, and the niceties on which her profession accepted or didn’t accept grievances. Life and death. Justified and not. And she had a point. She had serious points.

“May I see the letter, Bren‑ji? I don’t, of course, insist on it, but it would make matters clearer.”

He handed it over, Jago walked over to the window to read it, not, he thought, because she needed the light.

“I believe,” she said, “you’re urged to be very frank with these people, nadi. I think I understand Tabini‑aiji’s thinking, if I may be so forward. If anything should happen to you–it would be very useful to have popular sympathy.”

“If anything should happen to me.”

“Not fatally. But we have taken an atevi life.”

He stood stock still, hearing from Jago what he thought he heard. It was her impeccable honesty. She could not perceive that there was prejudice in what she said. She was thinking atevi politics. That was her job, for Tabini and for him.

“An atevi life.”

“We’ve taken it in defense of yours , nand’ paidhi. It’s our man’chi to have done so. But not everyone would agree with that choice.”

He had to ask. “Do you, nadi?”

Jago delayed her answer a moment. She folded the letter. “For Tabini’s sake I certainly would agree. May I keep this in file, nadi?”

“Yes,” he said, and shoved the affront out of his mind. What did you expect? he asked himself, and asked himself what was he to do without consultation, what might they ask and what dared he say?

Jago simply took the letter and left, through his bedroom, without answering his question.

An honest woman, Jago was, and she’d given him no grounds at all to question her protection. It wasn’t precisely what he’d questioned–but she doubtless didn’t see it that way.

He’d alienated Banichi and now he’d offended Jago. He wasn’t doing well at all today.

“Jago,” he called after her. “Are you going down to the airport?”

Atevi manners didn’t approve yelling at people, either. Jago walked all the way back to answer him.

“If you wish. But what I read in the letter gives me little grounds on which to delay these people, nand’ paidhi. I can only advise Banichi of your feelings. I don’t see how I could do otherwise.”

He was at the end of his resources. He made a small, weary bow. “About what I said. I’m tired, nadi, I didn’t express myself well.”

“I take no offense, Bren‑ji. The opinion of these people is uninformed. Shall I attempt to reach Banichi?”

“No,” he said in despair. “No. I’ll deal with them. Only suggest to Tabini on my behalf that he’s put me in a position which may cost me my job.”

“I’ll certainly convey that,” Jago said. And if Jago said it that way, he did believe it.

“Thank you, nadi,” he said, and Jago bowed and went on through the bedroom.

He followed, with a vacation advertisement and a crafts catalog, which he figured for bathtub reading.

Goodbye to the hour‑long bath. He rang for Djinana to advise him of the change in plans, he shed the coat in the bedroom, limped down the hall into the bathroom and shed dusty, spit‑stained clothes in the hamper on the way to the waiting tub.

The water was hot, frothed with herbs, and he would have cheerfully spent half the day in it, if Djinana would only keep pouring in warm water. He drowned the crafts catalog, falling asleep in mid‑scan–just dropped his hand and soaked it: he found himself that tired and that little in possession of his faculties.

But of course Tano came in to say a van had pulled up in the portico, and it was television people, with Banichi, and they were going to set up downstairs. Would the paidhi care to dress?

The paidhi would care to drown, rather than put on court formality and that damned tailored coat, but Tabini had other plans.

He’d not brought his notes on the transportation problems. He thought he should have. It went to question after question, until at least numbness had set in where he met the chair and where an empty stomach protested the lack of lunch.

“What,” the interviewer asked then, “determines the rate of turnover of information? Isn’t it true that all these systems exist on Mospheira?”

“Many do.”

“What wouldn’t?”

“We don’t use as much rail. Local air is easier. The interior elevations make air more practical for us.”

“But you didn’t present that as an option to the aiji two hundred years ago.”

“We frankly worried that we’d be attacked.”

“So there are other considerations than the environment.”

Sharp interviewer. And empowered by someone to ask questions that might not make the broadcast, but–might, still. Tabini had confidence in this man, and sent him.

“There’s also the risk,” he said, “of creating problems among atevi. You had rail–you almost had rail at the time of the Landing. If we’d thrown air travel into Shejidan immediately, it might have provoked disturbances among the outlying Associations. Not everyone believed Barjida‑aiji would share the technology. And better steam trains were a lot less threatening. We could have turned over rockets. We could have said, in the very first negotiations–here’s the formula for dynamite. And maybe irresponsible people would have decided to drop explosives on each other’s cities. We’d just been through a war. It was hard enough to get it stopped. We didn’t want to provide new weapons for another one. We could have dropped explosives from planes, when we built them. But we didn’t want to do that.”

“That’s a good point,” the interviewer said.

He hoped it was. He hoped people thought about it.

“We don’t ever want a war,” he said. “We didn’t have much choice about being on this planet. We caused harm we didn’t intend or want. It seems a fair repayment, what the Treaty asked.”

“Is there a limit to what you’ll turn over?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What about highways?”

Damn, that question again. He drew a breath to think about it. “Certainly I’ve seen the realities of transportation in the mountains. I intend to take my observations to our council. And I’m sure the nai‑aijiin will have recommendations to me, too.”

A little laughter at that. And a sober next question: “Yet you alone, rather than the legislature, determine whether a town gets the transport it needs.”

“Not myself alone. In consultation with the aiji, with the councils, with the legislatures.”

“Why not road development?”

“Because–”

Because mecheiti followed the leader. Because Babs was the leader, and Nokhada hadn’t a choice, without fighting that Nokhada didn’t want, damned stupid idea, and he had to say something to that question, something that didn’t insult atevi.

“Because,” he said, trapped. “We couldn’t predict what might happen. Because we saw the difficulties of regulation.” He panicked. He was losing the threads of it, not making sense, and not making sense sounded like a lie. “We feared at the outset the allocation of road funds might cause division within the Association. A breakdown of an authority we didn’t understand.”

The interviewer hesitated, politely expressionless. “Are you saying, nand’ paidhi, that this policy was based on misapprehension?”

Oh, God. “Initially, perhaps.” The mind snapped back into focus. The village problem was the atevi concern. “But we don’t think it would have led to a solution for the villages. If there’d been highways a hundred, two hundred years ago, there’d have been a growth in unregulated commerce. If that had happened–the commercial interests would build where the biggest highways were, and the straighter the highways, the more big population centers in a row, the more attraction they’d be–while no one but the aiji would have defended the remote villages, who still would have trouble getting transportation, very much what we have now, but we’d also have the pollution from the motors and the concentration of even more political power into the major population strings, along those roads. I see a place for a road system–in the villages, not the population centers, as spur lines to the centralized transport system.”

He didn’t engage the interviewer’s interest. He’d gotten too detailed, too technical, or at least promised to lead to technical matters the interviewer didn’t want or felt his audience didn’t want. He sensed the shift in intention, as the interviewer shifted position and frowned. He was glad of it. The interviewer posed a few more questions, about where he lived, about family associations, about what he did on vacation, thank God, none of them critical. He was sweating under the lights when the interview wound to its close and the interviewer went through the obligatory courtesies.

‘Thank you, nand’ paidhi,“ the man said, and Bren withheld the sigh of relief as the lights went out.

“I’m sorry,” he said at once, “I’m not used to cameras. I’m afraid I wasn’t very coherent at all.”

“You speak very well, nand’ paidhi, much better than some of our assignments, I assure you. We’re very pleased you found the time for us.” The interviewer stood up, he stood up, Banichi stood up, from the shadowed fringes, where the lights had obscured his presence. Everyone bowed. The interviewer offered a hand to shake. Someone must have told him that.

“You’ve been informed on our customs,” he ventured to say, and the interviewer was pleased and bowed, shaking hands with a crushing grip.

There was the commercial plane returning at sunset. The news crew had another assignment in Maidingi, on the electrical outage. Thank God. The crew was packing up lights, disconnecting cable run like an infestation of red and black vines across the ancient carpets, from the remote hallways. Maigi went to retrieve the far end somewhere near the kitchens, where, Bren was sure, the staff was not eager to admit strangers. Everything folded away into boxes, The glass‑eyed animals stared back from the walls, as amazed and dazed as the paidhi.

What have I done? he asked himself, asked himself if he could justify everything he’d said, when he wrote his report to Mospheira, but they’d kept off sensitive topics–he’d accomplished that much, give or take his mental lapse on the highway question.

“We’d like to do more such interviews,” the man said–he could not recall the name: Daigani or something like it. “We’d be delighted to tape one, nand’paidhi, actually in Mospheira. Perhaps reciprocal arrangements with your television, but one of our crews actually on site–interviews with ordinary people, that sort of thing.”

“Certainly if something of the sort could be worked out,” he answered. It was the answer to any unlikely proposal. He couldn’t have it go to Mospheira as something he’d agreed to. “I could contact the appropriate people–” It was a deliberate, Give me a phone , challenge to Banichi and Jago and Tabini. A dozen uneasy thoughts slithered through the back of his mind. The news services had to know that someone had tried to kill him, and no one had mentioned that fact. He hadn’t. The Bu‑javid’s conspiratorial attitude about security seeped into the blood and bone of those who lived there–one didn’t talk to the press without authorization, one didn’t carry gossip, one left it to the departments with authority to state official policy.

But he couldn’t tell the news that a man had died here yesterday? Or they knew and didn’t ask?

He didn’t know what had gone out on the news in the last week. He didn’t know what was common knowledge and what wasn’t, and the policy of his office said keep quiet when you didn’t know.

So he made polite expressions and bowed and sweated, still, in spite of the cooling of the air. A front was moving in. The crew hoped their flight would beat it out. They’d ridden through the front this morning, a choppy, bumpy flight, what Jago called ‘long,’ and the news crew called ‘uncomfortable,’

But the front doors were open now, with the wind blowing through, and the light coming in, brighter than the electric bulbs in this hall, which only managed a wan, golden glow. The crew carried out their lights, the interviewer lingered for small talk, and Tano and Algini had their heads together over by the door, watching the crew carry the equipment–Algini had come up with them. So had Banichi, Jago was… somewhere, probably resting; and meanwhile the thoughts about what he’d said and what he’d thought kept jostling one another at the back of his mind, clamoring for attention and further analysis.

Banichi carefully disengaged the interviewer, then, and walked him as far as the door, where one last round of bows was obligatory.

Bren made his own courtesies, and, with the last of the crew outside, leaned his shoulders against the shadowed back of the door and sighed in relief.

“Tano and Aligini will see them down to the airport,” Banichi said, turning up as a shadow out of the sunlight. “They may stay down, for supper. I discovered a good restaurant.”

“That’s fine,” he said, and didn’t ask Why don’t we all go? because most patrons didn’t like assassinations during the salad course. He realized he’d been nervous as hell about the interview, not alone because of the questions that might turn up, but because he didn’t trust the crew with all those boxes of equipment, and because he didn’t know these people.

He’d become, he decided, thoroughly paranoid. Afraid, And he didn’t think a crew from the national news network was going to produce explosive devices.

It was stupid.

“You did very well, nand’ paidhi.”

“I couldn’t get my thoughts together. I could have done better.”

“Tabini thinks there should be more of these interviews,” Banichi said. “He thinks it’s time the paidhi became more public. More in touch with the people.”

“Is that going to stop the people that don’t want me alive?” He didn’t mean to be negative. Doubtless the move was a good idea. Doubtless Tabini thought so. But his uneasy feeling persisted.

“Why don’t you go upstairs, nadi, and get out of the coat? You can relax now.”

He didn’t know if he could manage to relax, for the rest of the day, but the coat collar chafed, and he’d gotten stiff, sitting still. It was more than a good idea, to go up and change clothes. It was the only thing they’d let him do or decide for the rest of the day. His grand single decision.

Until tomorrow.

He said, because it was politic at the moment and because he’d meant it, earlier, and sullenly told himself he would, again: “I was rude last night, Banichi, forgive me.”

“I didn’t notice,” Banichi said. Banichi’s attention was out the door, toward the van, the doors of which were slamming shut.

“I’m sorry about your associate. And for your instructors.”

“It was none of your doing. Or mine. One only wishes he had been wiser–but no more successful.” Banichi laid a hand on his shoulder, only half welcome. “Go upstairs, nadi.”

Go away, don’t bother me. The paidhi could translate. Banichi’s thoughts were elsewhere, and he–after the heat of the lights–decided he was going to go back upstairs and finish the bath he’d had to leave. People didn’t bother him in the bath. He didn’t have to talk philosophy in the bath. And it helped a soreness he didn’t want to discuss with the servants.

It took no little time to fire up the boiler again, and run water. He took the time for a light lunch, in which he read the first committee letters, then thought–how quickly the mind dropped into familiar ruts–that he should take computer notes.

But they didn’t run extension cords from the kitchen for the paidhi, no, just for news cameramen, and no one mentioned going back to Shejidan.

So he had his bath, leaned his head back on the rim of the tub, steam rising around him. He had a glass of the human‑compatible liquor sitting by him, and a stack of catalogs… the vacation catalog, among them, plus one for sports equipment–not that he had any reasonable use for a second pair of skis, or another ski suit, but, then, almost all his catalog‑perusing was wishful.

Thunder rumbled through the stones. He wondered idly if the news crew’s commercial flight had made it out on schedule. He truly hoped so. He wanted them out and away. He wondered, too, what Algini and Tano were up to in the rustic pleasures of Maidingi township. Sightseeing around the lake shore, maybe. One hoped they wouldn’t be soaked.

He had a sip from the sweating glass– ice in good liquor? Tabini had asked him incredulously, early in their acquaintance.

Djinana, presented with such a request, had raised his brows and blinked, much more diplomatic. And with the power on again, and the lights working, ice did exist in the kitchens.

He turned the page and considered ski boots, scanned the art and culture inset, a service of the company, which described the recovery of old art from the data banks. Read the article on the building of the Mt. Allan Thomas resort, the first luxury establishment on Mospheira, where a hardy few had resurrected the idea of skiing.

Atevi were lately showing an interest in the sport, on their own mountains. Tabini called it suicide–then seemed to show a grudging flicker of interest himself, when he’d seen the homemade skiing tapes the paidhi had cleared through the Commission.

A potential common passion, human and atevi. Good for relations.

He’d almost talked Tabini into trying it, if the damned security crisis hadn’t blown up. He might yet. There were, supposedly, good slopes in the Bergid, only an hour away from Shejidan–where fools risked their necks, as Tabini put it.

The interview still bothered him. He still worried over what he’d said, or what expression he’d had, when atevi didn’t show expression… and he wasn’t used to television cameras and talking to glaring lights…

Thunder crashed. The lights flickered. And went out.

Incredible. He cast a baleful look at the dimmed ceiling, in which the bulb was out.

But he refused, this time, to be inconvenienced. Hot water didn’t become unhot instantly. The candles were still in the sconce. He got out in the warm air, took a candle from the candelabrum on the table, lit it from the boiler flame, and with the one candle, lit the candles in the sconce. He heard the servants shouting at each other down the hall, not panicked, except perhaps the cook, who probably had reason, at this hour. But come lightning, come storm, Malguri managed.

He settled back into the hot water, complacent and competent in his atevi past–the paidhi having learned the world didn’t stop when the power failed. He sipped his iced drink, and went back to the contemplation of safety ski bindings, buyer’s choice, black, white, or glowing green.

Hurried footsteps arrived from the accommodation. He looked up as a flashlight beam flared into his eyes, with a black, metal‑sparked figure behind it,

“Bren‑ji?” Jago asked. “Our apologies. It’s general, I’m afraid. Are you all right?”

“Perfectly fine,” he said. “–Do you mean to tell me that that piece of equipment they just freighted in and installed–just went out?”

“We truly don’t know, at this point. We suspect the first incident was arranged. We’re investigating this one. Please stay put.”

Away went the sense of security. The thought of intruders in the halls, while he was sitting in the bath–was not comfortable. “I’m getting out.”

“I’m going to be here,” Jago said. “You don’t have to, nadi‑ji.”

“I’d rather. It’s fine. I was just going to read.”

“I’ll be in the reception room. I’ll tell Djinana.”

Jago left. He climbed out and dressed by candlelight, took a candle with him, but someone had already lit the lamps in the bedroom and in the sitting room.

Rain spattered the sitting room windows, a gray sameness that began to seem natural. He felt sorry for Banichi–who was probably out in that. Sorry, and worried for his safety. He didn’t understand how someone faked a lightning strike, or what they could have found out that changed things.

He walked into the reception room, found Jago standing in front of the window, the clouded light making a mask of her profile and glittering on her uniform. She was staring out at the lake, or at the featureless sky.

“They wouldn’t try the same thing again,” he said. “They can’t be that crazy.”

Jago looked at him–gave a small, strange laugh. “Perhaps that makes them clever. They expect us not to take it for granted.”

“They?”

“Or he or she. One doesn’t know, nadi. We’re trying to find out.”

Don’t bother me, he decided that meant. He stood and looked out the window, which gave him nothing at all.

“Go read if you like,” Jago said.

As if the mind could leap, that quickly, back to ski catalogs. His damned well couldn’t. It didn’t like informational voids; it didn’t like silent guards lurking in his reception room, or the chance there was a reason to need them, possibly slipping up the stairs outside.

Read, hell. He wanted a window that overlooked something but gray. He hadn’t the disposition, he decided. He was far too nervous.

“Nadi Bren. Come away from the window.”

He didn’t think about such things. He was chagrined, to be caught twice, shook his head and walked back–

Jago was staring at him with disturbing worry–set to shepherd a fool, he supposed, who walked in front of windows. “Sorry,” he said.

“Think as one thinks trying to reach you,” she said. “Do them no favors. Go, sit, relax.”

Guild assassin, Banichi had said. Someone Banichi knew. Socialized with.

And didn’t yet know why a man had broken the rules?

“Jago,–how does a person get a license?”

“To do what, Bren‑ji?”

“You know. The Guild.” He wanted not to tread on sensibilities with Jago. He was sorry he’d wandered into the territory.

“To be licensed to the Guild? One elects. One chooses.”

It told him no more than before, what pushed a sane person in that direction. Jago didn’t seem the type–if there was a type to the profession.

“Bren‑ji. Why do you ask?”

“Wondering–what sort of person is after me.”

Jago seemed to ignore his question then, looking off to the window. Into rain‑spatter and nothing.

“We’re not one kind, Bren‑ji. We’re not one face.”

None of your business, he supposed. “Nadi,” he said, departing, willing to leave her to her own thoughts, if he could only shake his own.

“What sort becomes paidhi?” she asked him, before he could take a second step.

Good question, he thought. Solid hit. He had to think about it, and didn’t find the answer he’d used to have… couldn’t even locate the boy who’d started down that track, couldn’t believe in him, even marginally.

“A fool, probably.”

“One doubts, nadi‑ji. Is that a requirement?”

“I think so.”

“So… how do you vie for this honor? In what foolishness?”

“Curiosity. Wanting to know more than Mospheira. Doing good to the planet we’re on, the people we live next to.”

“Is this also Wilson?”

Dead hit. What could he say?

“You,” Jago said, “do not act like Wilson‑paidhi.”

“Valasi‑aiji,” he countered, “wasn’t Tabini, either.”

“True,” Jago said. “Very true.”

“Jago, I–” He was up against that word, which only governed salad courses. He shook his head and started to walk away.

“Bren‑ji. Please finish.”

He didn’t want to talk. He wasn’t sure of his rationality, let alone his self‑control. But Jago waited.

“Jago‑ji, I’ve worked all my life, best I can do. I don’t know what else I can do. Now we’ve lost the lights again. I don’t think I’ve deserved this. But I ask myself, nadi, is it my fault, have I gone too far and too fast, have I done Tabini harm by trying to help him, and is someone that damned persistent in trying to kill me? Why , Jago? Do you have the remotest notion?”

“You bring change,” Jago said. “To some, this is frightening.”

“The damned railroad ?” The emphasis of the interview bewildered him. Jago was all but a shadow to him, expressionless, unreachable. He made a frustrated dismissal with his hand and walked away toward the sitting room, only to gain a space to think, to sit down and read and take his mind off the day’s bizarre turn, maybe before supper, which she might share, if no one poisoned the cook.

But he stopped again, fearing he might insult her. “If someday,” he said, “this television business ever works out to bring news crews onto Mospheira, I’ll ask for you and Banichi to come visit my family, I’d like you to see what we are. I’d like you to know us, nadi‑ji.”

“I’d be most honored,” Jago said solemnly.

So perhaps he’d patched things. He walked away into the sitting room and threw another piece of wood onto the fire, while thunder echoed off the walls. Jago had followed him in, evidently conceiving that as what he wanted, but she said nothing, only took up looking through the sitting room library shelves instead.

There was no interfering with Jago’s notions of duty, or what she might conceive as being sociable. He took up his book, began to sit down.

The lights came on again.

He looked up, frustrated, at the ceiling fixtures.

“It must have been a fuse,” Jago said, from across the room. “That’s good.”

He recalled dusty old wires running beside bare natural gas pipes, along the hall ceiling, and envisioned the whole apartment going up in an electrical disaster. “Malguri needs a new electrical system,” he muttered. “Where do they have that gas tank?”

“What gas?”

“Methane.”

“In the cellar,” Jago said.

“Under the building. It’s a damned bomb, nadi. The place needs electric furnaces. If they’ve installed electric lights, surely electric furnaces can’t hurt.”

“Funding,” Jago said.

“While they’re looking for assassins–do they watch that tank?”

“Every access to this building,” Jago said, “is under surveillance.”

“Except when the power’s out.”

Jago made a small shrug.

“Those windows,” he said, “aren’t watched. I found that out last night, when the power came back on.”

Jago frowned, went close to the window, and ran a finger around the edge of the casement, looked up and around–at what, he couldn’t see.

“How did you find out, Bren‑ji?”

“I opened a window to look out. The power came back on. The alarm went off. I take it that’s an old system.”

“It certainly is,” Jago said. “Did you report this?”

“It woke the whole staff.”

Jago didn’t look happier, but what she saw, examining the window, he couldn’t tell.

“Except Banichi,” he said.

“Except Banichi.”

“I don’t know where he was. I told you. We had an argument. He went off somewhere.” He had an entirely unwelcome thought but kept his mouth shut on it, watched while Jago walked to the door, pulled it half‑shut, and looked at the wall behind it, still frowning. Security didn’t talk about security. He doubted an explanation was forthcoming.

“Nadi Jago,” he said. “Banichi wasn’t here. Do you have any notion where he was last night?”

He might have remarked it was raining outside. Jago’s expression never varied. She opened the door again to its ordinary position, walked out and into the reception room.

The lights went out again. He looked up in frustration, then followed her into the other room to protest the silence and the confusion of his security. She was at the window. She unlatched the side panel, opened it and shut it again, without an alarm.

“What in hell’s going on , Jago?”

Jago took out her pocket‑com and thumbed it on, rattled off a string of code he didn’t understand.

Banichi answered. He was relatively certain it was Banichi’s voice. And Jago’s stance showed some small reassurance. She answered, and cut the com off, and put it away.

“It did register,” she said. “ Our system registered.”

“Yours and Banichi’s?” he asked–but the com beeped and Jago thumbed it on again and answered it, frowning.

Banichi’s voice replied. Jago’s frown deepened. She answered Banichi shortly, a sign‑off, clipped the corn to her belt and headed for the door.

“What was that?” he asked. “What’s happening? Jago?”

She crossed back in two strides, seized his shoulders and looked down at him. “Bren‑ji. I’ve never betrayed you. I will not , Bren‑ji.”

After which she was out the hall door at the same pace. She shut it. Hard.

Jago? he thought. His shoulders still felt the force of her fingers. And her footsteps were fading at a rapid pace down the hall outside, while he stood there asking himself where Banichi had been last night when he’d set the alarm off.

If there was another system–Banichi had known about him opening that window, if Banichi had been monitoring it. And for whatever reason–Banichi hadn’t come back when the general alarm went.

Maybe because Banichi had already discounted it as a threat. But that wasn’t the Banichi he knew, to take something like that for granted.

It was craziness, from breakfast with the dowager to the television crew arriving in the middle of a security so tight he couldn’t get a telephone. He didn’t like the feeling he was having. He didn’t like the reasons that might make Jago go running out of here, saying, in a language that didn’t have a definite word for trust– trust me to take care of you.

He double‑checked the window latch. What kind of person could get in on the upper floor overlooking a sheer drop, he didn’t know, but he didn’t want to find out. He checked the outer door lock, although he’d heard it click.

But what good that was when everyone on staff had keys to the back hall of this place–

He had a sudden and anxious thought, went straight to his bedroom and, on his knees by the bed, reached under the mattress.

The gun Banichi had given him… wasn’t there.

He searched, thinking that the Malguri staff, making the bed, might have shifted it without knowing it was there. He lifted the mattress to be sure–found nothing; no gun, no ammunition.

He let the mattress back down and arranged the bedclothes and the furs–sat down then, on the edge of the bed, trying to keep panic at arm’s length, reasoning with himself that he had as much time to discover the gun missing as they thought it might take him, before they grew anxious; and if they hadn’t devised visual surveillance in the rooms he didn’t know about, whoever had taken it didn’t know yet that he’d discovered the fact.

Fact: someone had it. Someone was armed with it, more to the point, who might or might not ordinarily have access to that issue pistol, or its caliber of ammunition. It was Banichi’s–and if Banichi hadn’t taken it himself, then somebody had a gun with an identification and a distinctive marking on its bullets that could report it right back to Banichi’s commander in the Bu‑javid.

No matter what it was used for.

If Banichi didn’t know what had happened–Banichi needed to know it was gone–and he didn’t have a phone, a pocket‑com, or any way he knew to get one, except to walk out the door, go violate some security perimeter and hope it was Banichi who answered the alarm.

Which was the plan he had. Not the most discreet way to attract attention.

But, again, so long as he called no one’s bluff–things might stay quiet until Banichi or Jago got back. The missing gun wasn’t a thing to bring to the staff’s attention. He could probably trust Tano and Algini, who’d come with them from Shejidan–but he didn’t know that.

He was rattled. He was tired, after an uneasy night and a nerve‑wracking afternoon. He wasn’t, perhaps, making his best decisions–wasn’t up to cleverness, without knowing more than he did.

His nerves twitched to distant thunder–that also was how tired he was. He could go try to trip alarms–but Banichi and Jago were out in the rain, chasing someone, or worse, chasing someone inside the house. His imagination pictured a tank of methane sitting in the basement, someone with explosives–

But they mustn’t deface Malguri. Atevi wouldn’t take that route. Mishidi . Awkward. Messy. No biichi‑ji .

So they wouldn’t explode the place. If anything happened, and a bullet turned up where it shouldn’t, with marks that could trace it to Banichi, he could swear to what had really happened.

Unless he was the corpse in question.

Not a good time to go walking the halls, he decided, or startling his own security, who thought they knew where he was. He’d planned to spend the afternoon reading. He found he had no better or wiser plans. He got his dressing gown for a little extra warmth, went back to the sitting‑room fire and picked up his book, back in the histories of Malguri.

About atevi. And loyalty. And expectations that didn’t work out.

Expectations on his side, too–about feelings that just weren’t there. Flat weren’t there, and no use–no possibility –of changing anything to do with biology. What could one do? Pour human hormones into atevi bloodstreams, crosswire atevi brains to send impulses atevi brains didn’t have?

And ask how humans had to fail atevi expectations, at what emotional level. There had to be an emotional level.

No. There didn’t have to be. Terracentric thinking again. There was nothing in the laws of the universe that said what let atevi achieve a very respectable society on their own had to have human attributes, or respond when humans tried to attach to them in human ways. In a reasonable universe, it didn’t have to happen; more, in a reasonable universe, it was more reasonable for atevi locomotives to resemble human‑built locomotives than for atevi to resemble humans psychologically. Locomotives, designed by whatever species, had tracks for easy rolling, shafts to drive the wheels, steam or diesel, and gears to power the shafts, and a pipe to vent the smoke–that was physics. Airplanes flying through an equal density of air wouldn’t tend to look like locomotives. Rockets wouldn’t resemble refrigerators. Physics had its constraints for machines and structures with one job to do, and physics on old Earth and physics on the earth of the atevi wasn’t a smidge different.

But biology, for intelligent beings with a whole damned lot of jobs to do, with microenvironments, evolutionary pressures, and genetic baroque sifted into the mix–had one hell of a lot of variables in potential makeup.

Not anybody’s fault. Not anybody’s fault they’d come to this star–wormhole, discontinuity of some kind–the physics people had their theories, but no human could prove the cause from where they sat, which was on the far side of God‑knew‑what galactic disk, for all they knew: no spectrum matched Sol or its neighbors, the pulsars, which the physicists said could peg their location… hadn’t.

They hadn’t known where they were then, and they didn’t know now–as if where they were had any absolute referent when they didn’t know how long it had taken them to get there: hundreds of years in subspace, for all anyone knew–stuck here, able to cobble the station together–

But it was a long, slow haul to the star’s frozen debris belt and back to the life‑zone, where they’d built the station: that, the way he’d understood it, had been the real politics, whether to build in the life‑zone or at the edge of it; and the life‑zone had won out, even knowing it was around a living world, even knowing someday it was going to mean admitting they were making a dangerous choice on very little data…

Political compromise. Accepting a someday problem to solve a near‑term worry.

Add in the refinery wreck and the solar storms, which no one at the time knew the limit of, and the attractive planet just lying there under their feet, hell–they’d do no damage, they’d get along, the natives already had steam, they were bound to encounter anyway, and why should they risk their precious lives trying to hold together against the odds.

At least, that was how a descendant nine or so generations down reconstructed the decision‑making process… the atevi couldn’t be too different. They had locomotives. They had steam mills. They had industry.

They had one hell of a different hard‑wiring, but you couldn’t tell that from the physics they used.

Couldn’t tell that meeting an atevi. Hello, how are you, how’s the weather? Nice people. Arrange a little trade, a little tech for an out‑of‑season game animal or two…

Right bang into the cultural rift.

Try to settle it–make it right with the local leaders: right into the cultural whirlpool.

Count the ways the first settlement had screwed it up. Count the ways they’d gotten good and deep into the interface before they’d begun to figure out betrayal wasn’t betrayal and murder wasn’t murder and that you couldn’t promote one local aiji and fight another one without involving a continent‑spanning Association with everything that conflict dragged into it. You didn’t expect a steam‑powered civilization to have world government…

But, then, if you were an early human colonist, maybe you didn’t expect anyone to behave in any way you wouldn’t.

Fifty years and two paidhiin ago, Mospheira had taken a collective deep breath and thrown satellite communications and rocket science onto the table, with the fervent hope that by hooking it to advanced communications, biichi‑ji and kabiu together would keep some enterprising atevi entity from combining the explosive with the propellant technology and blowing their rivals to hell.

Because they thought now they’d gotten to know the atevi.

God help fools and tourists.

He flipped an unread page of the history, realized he hadn’t read it, and flipped it back again, trying to concentrate on the doings of aijiin and councillors long since drifting on the Malguri winds, washed into its soil with the rains, down to the sea from Lake Maidingi rather more rapidly in this season than in fall.

He was bitterly angry and his mind was wandering, back and forth inside known limits, like a caged creature, when the real answers had to lie outside the bars of his understanding.

Maybe it was a point all paidhiin got to. Maybe he was the most naive, maybe because he’d gone into a relationship with the most friendly of aijiin, and it was so damned easy to ignore the warnings in every text he’d ever studied and fall right into the same trap as the first humans on the planet… expecting atevi to be human. Expecting atevi to do what one naturally expected nice, sane human people to do and, God help him twice, what he wanted atevi to do, what he emotionally needed atevi to do, instead of himself waking up, paying attention to danger signals, and doing the job he’d been sent here for.

He should have made that phone call, back in Shejidan, if he’d had to make it with Bu‑javid guards battering down the door. He shouldn’t be thinking, even at this hour, that Tabini was under some sort of pressure and desperately needed him back in Shejidan, because if that was the case, then the television network Tabini tightly managed wouldn’t be looking for interviews to prove the paidhi was a nice, easy‑going friendly fellow, not some shadow‑villain plotting world domination or contriving death‑rays to level cities.

I will not betray you, Bren‑ji?

What in hell did that mean, before Jago lit out the door and down the hall at the next thing to a dead run? And where’s the gun, Jago? Where is Banichi’s gun?

The logs burned down and fell, showering sparks up the flue. He put on another, and settled back to his book.

Not a word back from Banichi or Jago about what was wrong out there–whether someone had breached the security perimeter, or whether someone odd had simply arrived at the airport or whether they’d had some dire word from Tabini.

He flipped the page, figured out he’d stopped reading the second time somewhere in the middle of it, and turned it back, with a dogged effort to concentrate on the text, in atevi directions, and to make sense out of the antique, ornate type style.

The lights went on again, out again.

Damn, he thought, and looked at the window. The rain was down to spatters now, gray cloud and a scattering of bright drops on the glass. The candles cast a golden glow. White light came from the window, as if the clouds were finally thinning up there.

He laid the book down, got up with the intention of having a look at the weather–heard someone in his bedroom and saw Djinana coming through from the back hall.

“The transformer or a bad wire?” he asked Djinana conversationally.

“One hopes, a wire,” Djinana said, and bowed, at the door. “Nadi, a message for you.”

Message? In this place of no telephones?

Djinana offered him a tiny scroll–Ilisidi’s seal and ribbon, he judged before he even looked, because the red and black was Tabini’s house. He opened it with his thumbnail, wondering was it something to do with the after‑breakfast engagement. A cancellation, perhaps, or postponement due to the weather.

I need to speak with you immediately , it said. I’ll meet you in the downstairs hall , It had Cenedi’s signature.

IX

« ^ »

D ownstairs all the oil lamps were lit and a fire burned in the hearth. The outer hall, with its ancient weapons and its trophy heads and its faded, antique banners, was all golds and browns and faded reds. The upward stairs and the retreating hall below them were cast in shadow, interrupted by circles of lamplight from upstairs and down. Power was still out. Power looked to stay out, this time, and Bren regretted not wearing his coat downstairs. Someone must have had the front door open recently. The whole lower hall was cold.

But he expected no long meeting, no formality, and the fire moderated the chill. He stood warming his hands, waiting–heard someone coming from Ilisidi’s part of the house, and cast a glance toward that recessed, main‑floor hallway.

It was indeed Cenedi, dark‑uniformed, with sparks of metal about his person, epitome of the Guild‑licensed personal bodyguard. He thought that Cenedi would come as far as the fire, and that Cenedi would deliver him some private word and then let him go back to his supper–but Cenedi walked only far enough to catch his eye and beckoned for him to follow.

Follow him–where? Bren asked himself, not as easy about this little shadow‑play as about the simple summons downstairs–as difficult to refuse as the rest of Ilisidi’s invitations.

But in this turn of events he had a moment’s impulse to excuse himself upstairs on the pretext of getting his coat, and to send Djinana to find Banichi or Jago–which he knew now he should already have done. Dammit, he said to himself, if he had been half thinking upstairs…

But he no longer knew which side of many sides was dealing in truth tonight–no longer knew for certain how many sides there were. The gun was missing. Someone had it… possibly Cenedi, possibly Banichi. Possibly Banichi had taken it to keep Cenedi from finding it: the chances were too convoluted to figure. If Djinana and Maighi had discovered it and taken it to Cenedi, he believed in his heart of hearts that Djinana could not have faced him without some visible sign of guilt. Not every atevi was as self‑controlled as Banichi or Jago.

But while his guards were out and about on whatever business they were pursuing, he had been making his own decisions this far and come to no grief, and if Cenedi did want to talk to him about the gun, best not try to bluff about it and make Cenedi doubt his truthfulness, bottom line. He could take responsibility on himself for it being there. Cenedi had no way of knowing he hadn’t packed the luggage himself. If the paidhi had to leave office in scandal… God knew, it was better than seeing Tabini implicated, and the Association weakened. It was his own mess. He might have to face the consequences of it.

But if Cenedi had the gun and the serial number, surely the aiji‑dowager’s personal guard had the means to contact the police and have that gun traced through records– by the very computers the paidhi had hoped to make a universal convenience. And a lie trying to cover Banichi could make matters worse.

There were just too damn many things out of place: Banichi’s behavior, Jago’s rushing off like that, this man, dead in the driveway, being some old schoolmate of Banichi’s… or whatever licensed assassins called their fellows.

Cenedi at least had missed opportunity after opportunity to fling the paidhi off the mountainside with no one the wiser. The near‑fatal tea could have been stronger. If there was something sinister going on within the household, if Tabini had sent him here simply to get Banichi and Jago inside Ilisidi’s defenses–that was his own nightmare scenario–the paidhi was square in the middle of it; he liked Ilisidi, dammit, Cenedi had never done him any harm, and what in the name of God had he gotten himself into, coming down here to talk to Cenedi in private? He could lie with an absolutely innocent face when he had an official, canned line to hand out. But he couldn’t lie effectively about things like guns, and whether Banichi was up to anything… he didn’t know any answers, either, but he couldn’t deal with the questions without showing an anxiety that an ateva would read as extreme.

He walked through the circles of lamplight, back and back into the mid‑hall where Cenedi stood waiting for him, a tall shadow against the lamplight from an open door, a shadow that disappeared inside before he reached the door.

He expected only Cenedi. Another of Ilisidi’s guards was in the office, a man he’d ridden with that morning. He couldn’t remember the name, and he didn’t know at first, panicked thought what that man should have to do with him.

Cenedi sat down and offered the chair at the side of his desk. “Nand’ paidhi, please.” And with a wry irony: “Would you–I swear to its safety–care for tea?”

One could hardly refuse that courtesy. More, it explained the second man, there to handle the amenities, he supposed, in a discussion Cenedi might not want bruited about outside the office. “Thank you,” he said gratefully, and took the chair, while the guard poured a cup for him and one for Cenedi.

Cenedi dismissed the man then, and the man shut the door as he left. The two oil lamps on the wall behind the desk cast Cenedi’s broad‑shouldered shape in exaggerated, overlapping shadows, emitted fumes that made the air heavy, as, one elbow on the desk, one hand occasionally for the teacup, Cenedi sorted through papers on his desk as if those had the reason of the summons and he had lost precisely the one he wanted.

Then Cenedi looked straight at him, a flash of lambent yellow, the quirk of a smile on his face.

“How are you sitting this evening, nand’ paidhi? Any better?”

“Better.” It set him off his guard, made him laugh, a little frayed nerves, there, and he sat on it. Fast

“Only one way to get over it,” Cenedi said, “The dowager’s guard sympathizes, nand’ paidhi. They laugh. But we’ve suffered. Don’t think their humor aimed at you.”

“I didn’t take it so, I assure you.”

“You’ve a fair seat for a beginner. I take it you don’t spend all your time at the desk.”

He was flattered. But not set off his guard a second time. “I spend it on the mountain, when I get the chance. About twice a year.”

“Climbing?”

“Skiing.”

“I’ve not tried that,” Cenedi said, shuffling more paper, trimming up a stack, “I’ve seen it on television.. Some young folk trying it, up in the Bergid. No offense, but I’d rather a live instructor than a picture in a contraband catalog and some promoter’s notion how not to break your neck.”

“Is that where my mail’s been going?”

“Oh, there’s a market for it. The post tries to be careful. But things do slip.”

Is that what this is about? Bren asked himself. Someone stealing mail? Selling illicit catalogs?

“If you get me to the Bergid this winter,” he said, “I’d be glad to show you the basics. Fair trade for the riding lessons.”

Cenedi achieved a final, two‑handed stack in his desk‑straightening. “I’d like that, nand’ paidhi. On more than one account. I’d like to persuade the dowager back to Shejidan. Malguri is hell in the winter.”

They still hadn’t gotten to the subject. But it wasn’t uncommon in atevi business to meander, to set a tone. Atevi manners.

“Maybe we can do that,” he said, “I’d like to.”

Cenedi sipped his tea and set the cup down. “They don’t ride on Mospheira.”

“No. No mecheiti.”

“You hunt.”

“Sometimes.”

“On Mospheira?”

Were they talking about guns, now? Was that where this was going? “I have. A few times. Small game. Very small.”

“One remembers,” Cenedi said–as if any living atevi could remember. “Is it very different, Mospheira?”

“From Malguri?” One didn’t quite go off one’s guard. “Very. From Shejidan–much less so.”

“It was reputed–quite beautiful before the War.”

“It still is. We have very strict rules–protection of the rivers, the scenic areas. Preservation of the species we found there.”

Cenedi leaned back in his chair. “Do you think, nadi, there’ll be a time Mospheira will open up–to either side of the strait?”

“I hope it will happen.”

“But do you think it will happen, nand’ paidhi?”

Cenedi might have gotten to his subject, or might have led away from the matter of the gun simply to make him relax. He couldn’t figure–and he felt more than a mild unease. The question touched policy matters on which he couldn’t comment without consultation. He didn’t want to say no to Cenedi, when Cenedi was being pleasant. It could target whole new areas for Cenedi’s curiosity. “It’s my hope. That’s all I can say.” He took a sip of hot tea. “It’s what I work very hard for, someday to have that happen, but no paidhi can say when–it’s for aijiin and presidenti to work out.”

“Do you think this television interview is–what is your expression?–a step in the right direction?”

Is that it? Publicity? Tabini’s campaign for association with Mospheira? “Honestly, nadi Cenedi, I was disappointed. I don’t think we got to any depth. There are things I wanted to say. And they never asked me those. I wasn’t sure what they wanted to do with it. It worried me–what they might put in, that I hadn’t meant.”

“I understand there’s some thought about monthly broadcasts. The paidhi to the masses.”

“I don’t know. I certainly don’t decide things like that on my own. I’m obliged to consult.”

“By human laws, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not autonomous.”

“No. I’m not.” Early on, atevi had expected paidhiin to make and keep agreements–but the court in Shejidan didn’t have this misconception now, and he didn’t believe Cenedi was any less informed. “Though in practicality, nadi, paidhiin aren’t often overruled. We just don’t promise what we don’t think our council will accept. Though we do argue with our council, and sometimes we win.”

“Do you favor more interviews? Will you argue for the idea?”

Ilisidi was on the conservative side of her years. Probably she didn’t like television cameras in Malguri, let alone the idea of the paidhi on regular network broadcasts. He could imagine what she might say to Tabini.

“I don’t know what position I’ll argue. Maybe I’ll wait and see how atevi like the first one. Whether people want to see a human face–or not. I may frighten the children.”

Cenedi laughed. “Your face has already been on television, nand’ paidhi, at least the official clips. ‘The paidhi discussed the highway program with the minister of Works, the paidhi has indicated a major new release forthcoming in microelectronics…’ ”

“But that’s not an interview. And a still picture. I can’t understand why anyone would want to hear me discuss the relative merits of microcircuits for an hour‑long program.”

“Ah, but your microcircuits work by numbers. Such intricate geometries. The hobbyists would deluge the phone system. ‘Give us the paidhi,’ they’d say. ‘Let us hear the numbers.’ ”

He wasn’t sure Cenedi was joking at first. A few days removed from the Bu‑javid and one could forget the intensity, the passion of the devout number‑counters. He decided it was a joke–Tabini’s sort of joke, irreverent of the believers, impatient of the complications their factions created.

“Or people can think my proposals contain wicked numbers,” Bren said, himself taking a more serious turn. “As evidently some do think.” And a second diversion, Cenedi delaying to reveal his reasons. “– Is it a blown fuse, this time, nadi?”

“I think it’s a short somewhere. The breaker keeps going off. They’re trying to find the source.”

“Jago received some message from Banichi a while ago that distressed her, and she left. It worried me, nadi. So did your summons. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“Banichi’s working with the house maintenance staff. I don’t know what he might have found, but he’s extremely exacting. His subordinates do hurry when they’re asked.” Cenedi took another drink of tea, a large one, and set the cup down. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He’d have advised me, I think, if he’d found anything irregular. Certainly house maintenance would, independent of him.–Another cup, nadi?”

He’d diverted Cenedi from his conversation. He was obligated to another cup. “Thank you,” he said, and started to get up to get his own tea, in the absence of a servant, and not suggesting Cenedi do the office, but Cenedi signaled otherwise, reached a long arm across the corner of the desk, picked up the pot and poured for him and for himself.

“Nadi, a personal curiosity–and I’ve never had the paidhi at hand to ask: all these years you’ve been dealing out secrets. When will you be out of them? And what will you do then?”

Odd that no one had ever asked the paidhiin that quite that plainly… on this side of the water, although God knew they agonized over it on Mospheira.

And perhaps that was Cenedi’s own and personal question, though not the question, he was sure, which Cenedi had called him downstairs specifically to answer. It was the sort of thing an astute news service might ask. The sort of thing a child might… not a political sophisticate like Cenedi, not officially.

But it was very much the sort of question he’d already begun to hint at in technical meetings, testing the waters, beginning, one hoped, to shift attitudes among atevi, and knowing atevi couldn’t go much farther down certain paths without developments resisted for years by vested interests in other departments.

“Things don’t only flow one way across the strait, nadi. We learn from your scientists, quite often. Not to say we’ve stood still ourselves since the Landing. But the essential principles have been on the table for a hundred years. I’m not a scientist–but as I understand it, it’s the intervening steps, the things that atevi science has to do before the principles in other areas become clear–those are the things still missing. There’s materials science. There’s the kind of industry it takes to support the science. And the education necessary for new generations to understand it. The councils are still debating the shape of baffles in fuel tanks–when no one’s teaching the students in the schools why you need a slosh baffle in the first place.”

“You find us slow students?”

That trap was obvious as a pit in the floor. And damned right they’d expected atevi to pick things up faster–give or take aijiin who wouldn’t budge and committees that wouldn’t release a process until they’d debated it to death. An incredibly short path to flight and advanced metallurgy. An incredibly difficult one to get a damn bridge built as it needed to be to stand the stresses of heavy‑hauling trains.

“Extremely quick students,” he said, “interminable debaters.”

Cenedi laughed. “And humans debate nothing.”

“But we don’t have to debate the technology, nadi Cenedi. We have it. We use it.”

“Did it bring you success?”

Watch it, he thought. Watch it. He gave a self‑deprecating shrug, atevi‑style. “We’re comfortable in the association we’ve made. The last secrets are potentially on the table, nadi. We just can’t get atevi conservatives to accept the essential parts of them. Our secrets are full of numbers. Our numbers describe the universe. And how can the universe be unfortunate? We are confused when certain people claim the numbers add in anything but felicitous combination. We can only believe nature.” He was talking to Ilisidi’s seniormost guard, Ilisidi, who chose to reside in Malguri. Ilisidi, who hunted for her table–but believed in the necessity of dragonettes. “Surely, in my own opinion, not an expert opinion, nadi, someone must have added in what nature didn’t put in the equations.”

It was a very reckless thing to say, on one level. On the other, he hadn’t said which philosophy of numbers he faulted and which he favored, out of half a dozen he personally knew in practice, and, human‑wise, couldn’t do in his head. He personally wanted to know where Cenedi, personally, stood–and Cenedi’s mouth tightened in a rare amusement.

“While the computers you design secretly assign unlucky attributes,” Cenedi said wryly. “And swing the stars in their courses.”

“Not that I’ve seen happen. The stars go where nature has them going, nadi Cenedi. The same with the reasons for slosh baffles.”

“Are we superstitious fools?”

“Assuredly not. There’s nothing wrong with this world. There’s nothing wrong with Malguri. There’s nothing wrong with the way things worked before we arrived. It’s just–if atevi want what we know–”

“Counting numbers is folly?”

Cenedi wanted him to admit to heresy. He had a sudden, panicked fear of a hidden tape recorder–and an equal fear of a lie to this man, a lie that would break the pretense of courtesy with Cenedi before he completely understood what the game was.

“We’ve given atevi true numbers, nadi, I’ll swear to that. Numbers that work, although some doubt them, even in the face of the evidence of nature right in front of them.”

“Some doubt human good will, more than they doubt the numbers.”

So it wasn’t casual conversation Cenedi was making. They sat here by the light of oil lamps– he sat here, in Cenedi’s territory, with his own security elsewhere and, for all he knew, uninformed of his position, his conversation, his danger.

“Nadi, my predecessors in the office never made any secret how we came here. We arrived at this star completely by accident, and completely desperate. We’d no idea atevi existed. We didn’t want to starve to death. We saw our equipment damaged. We knew it was a risk to us and, I admit it, to you, for us to go down from the station and land–but we saw atevi already well advanced down a technological path very similar to ours. We thought we could avoid harming anyone. We thought the place where we landed was remote from any association–since it had no buildings. That was the first mistake.”

“Which party do you consider made the second?”

They were charting a course through ice floes. Nothing Cenedi asked was forbidden. Nothing he answered was controversial–right down the line of the accepted truth as paidhiin had told it for over a hundred years.

But he thought for a fleeting second about the mecheiti, and about atevi government, while Cenedi waited–too long, he thought, to let him refuse the man some gain.

“I blame the War,” he said, “on both sides giving wrong signals. We thought we’d received encouragement to things that turned out quite wrong, fatally wrong, as it turned out.”

“What sort of encouragement?”

“We thought we’d received encouragement to come close, encouragement to treat each other as…” There wasn’t a word. “Known. After we’d developed expectations. We went to all‑out war after we’d had a promising beginning of a settlement. People who think they were betrayed don’t believe twice in assurances.”

“You’re saying you weren’t at fault.”

“I’m saying atevi weren’t, either. I believe that.”

Cenedi tapped the fingers of one hand, together, against the desk, thinking, it seemed. Then: “An accident brought you to us. Was it a mistake of numbers?”

He found breath scarce in the room, perhaps the oil lamps, perhaps having gone in over his head with a very well‑prepared man.

“We don’t know,” he said. “Or I don’t. I’m not a scientist.”

“But don’t your numbers describe nature? Was it a supernatural accident?”

“I don’t think so, nadi. Machinery may have broken. Such things do happen. Space is a vacuum, but it has dust, it has rocks–like trying to figure which of millions of dust motes you might disturb by breathing.”

“Then your numbers aren’t perfect.”

Another pitfall of heresy. “Nadi, engineers approximate, and nature corrects them. We approach nature. Our numbers work, and nature doesn’t correct us constantly. Only sometimes. We’re good. We’re not perfect.”

“And the War was one of these imperfections?”

“A very great one.–But we can learn , nadi. I’ve insulted Jago at least twice, but she was patient until I figured it out. Banichi’s made me extremely unhappy–and I know for certain he didn’t know what he did, but I don’t cease to value associating with him. I’ve probably done harm to others I don’t know about,–but at least, at least, nadi, at very least we’re not angry with each other, and we each know that the other side means to be fair. We make a lot of mistakes… but people can make up their minds to be patient.”

Cenedi sat staring at him, giving him the feeling… he didn’t know why… that he had entered on very shaky ground with Cenedi. But he hadn’t lost yet. He hadn’t made a fatal mistake. He wished he knew whether Banichi knew where he was at the moment.

“Yet,” Cenedi said, “someone wasn’t patient. Someone attempted your life.”

“Evidently.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“I have no idea, nadi. I truly don’t, in specific, but I’m aware some people just don’t like humans.”

Cenedi opened the drawer of his desk and took out a roll of paper heavy with the red and black ribbons of the aiji’s house.

Ilisidi’s, he thought apprehensively, as Cenedi passed it across the desk to him. He unrolled it and saw instead a familiar hand.

Tabini’s.

I send you a man, ’Sidi‑ji, for your disposition. I have filed Intent on his behalf, for his protection from faceless agencies, not, I think, agencies faceless to you, but I make no complaint against you regarding a course of action which under extraordinary circumstances you personally may have considered necessary .

What is this? he thought and, in the sudden, frantic sense of limited time, read again, trying to understand was it Tabini’s threat against Ilisidi or was he saying Ilisidi was behind the attack on him?

And Tabini sent him here ?

Therefore I relieve you of that unpleasant and dangerous necessity, ’Sidi‑ji, my favorite enemy, knowing that others may have acted against me invidiously, or for personal gain, but that you, alone, have consistently taken a stand of principle and policy against the Treaty.

Neither I nor my agents will oppose your inquiries or your disposition of the paidhi‑aiji at this most dangerous juncture. I require only that you inform me of your considered conclusions, and we will discuss solutions and choices.

Disposition of the paidhi? Tabini, Tabini, for God’s sake, what are you doing to me?

My agents have instructions to remain but not to interfere.

Tabini‑aiji with profound respect

To Ilisidi of Malguri, in Malguri, in Maidingi Province…

His hands shook. He tried not to let them. He read the letter two and three times, and found no other possible interpretation. It was Tabini’s handwriting. It was Tabini’s seal. There was no possible forgery. He tried to memorize the wording in the little time he reasonably had to hold the document, but the elaborate letters blurred in his eyes. Reason tried to intervene, interposing the professional, intellectual understanding that Tabini was atevi, that friendship didn’t guide him, that Tabini couldn’t even comprehend the word.

That Tabini, in the long run, had to act in atevi interests, and as an ateva, not in any human‑influenced way that needed to make sense to him.

Intellect argued that he couldn’t waste time feeling anything, or interpreting anything by human rules. Intellect argued that he was in dire and deep trouble in this place, that he had a slim hope in the indication that Banichi and Jago were to stay here–an even wilder hope in the possibility Tabini might have been compelled to betray him, and that Tabini had kept Banichi and Jago on hand for a reason… a wild and improbable rescue…

But it was all a very thin, very remote possibility, considering that Tabini had felt constrained to write such a letter at all.

And if Tabini was willing to risk the paidhi’s life and along with it the advantage of Mospheira’s technology, one could only conclude that Tabini’s power was threatened in some substantial way that Tabini couldn’t resist.

Or one could argue that the paidhi had completely failed to understand the situation he was in.

Which offered no hope, either.

He handed Cenedi back the letter with, he hoped, not quite so obvious a tremor in his hands as might have been. He wasn’t afraid. He found that curious. He was aware only of a knot in his throat, and a chill lack of sensation in his fingers.

“Nadi,” he said quietly. “I don’t understand. Are you the ones trying to kill me in Shejidan?”

“Not directly. But denial wouldn’t serve the truth, either.”

Tabini had armed him contrary to the treaty.

Cenedi had killed an assassin on the grounds. Hadn’t he?

The confusion piled up around him.

“Where’s Banichi? And Jago? Do they know about this? Do they know where I am?”

“They know. I say that denial of responsibility would be a lie. But I will also own that we are embarrassed by the actions of an associate who called on a licensed professional for a disgraceful action. The Guild has been embarrassed by the actions of a single individual acting for personal conviction. I personally–embarrassed myself, in the incident of the tea. More, you accepted my apology, which makes my duty at this moment no easier, nand’ paidhi. I assure you there is nothing personal in this confrontation. But I will do whatever I feel sufficient to find the truth in this situation.”

“What situation?”

“Nand’ paidhi. Do you ever mislead us? Do you ever tell us less–or more–than the truth?”

His hazard didn’t warrant rushing to judgment headlong–or dealing in on‑the‑spot absolutes, with a man the extent of whose information or misinformation he didn’t know. He tried to think. He tried to be absolutely careful.

“Nadi, there are times I may know… some small technical detail, a circuit, a mode of operation–sometimes a whole technological field–that I haven’t brought to the appropriate committee; or that I haven’t put forward to the aiji. But it’s not that I don’t intend to bring it forward, no more than other paidhiin have ever withheld what they know. There is no technology we have that I intend to withhold–ever.”

“Have you ever, in collaboration with Tabini, rendered additional numbers into the transmissions from Mospheira to the station?”

God.

“Ask the aiji.”

“Have those numbers been supplied to you by the aiji?”

“Ask him.”

Cenedi looked through papers, and looked up again, his dark face absolutely impassive. “I’m asking you, nand’ paidhi. Have those numbers been supplied to you by the aiji?”

“That’s Tabini’s business. Not mine.” His hands were cold. He worked his fingers and tried to pretend to himself that the debate was no more serious than a council meeting, at which, very rarely, the questions grew hot and quick. “If Tabini‑aiji sends to Mospheira, I render what he says accurately. That’s my job. I wouldn’t misrepresent him, or Mospheira. That is my integrity, nadi Cenedi. I don’t lie to either party.”

Another silence, long and tense, in which the thunder of an outside storm rumbled through the stones.

“Have you always told the truth, nadi?”

“In such transactions? Yes. To both sides.”

“ I have questions for you, in the name of the aiji‑dowager. Will you answer them?”

The walls of the trap closed. It was the nightmare every paidhi had feared and no one had yet met, until, God help him, he had walked right into it, trusting atevi even though he couldn’t translate the concept of trust to them, persisting in trusting them when his own advisors said no, standing so doggedly by his belief in Tabini’s personal attachment to him that he hadn’t called his office when he’d received every possible warning things were going wrong.

If Cenedi wanted to use force now… he had no help. If Cenedi wanted him to swear that there was a human plot against atevi… he had no idea whether he could hold out against saying whatever Cenedi wanted.

He gave a slight, atevi shrug, a move of one hand. “As best I can,” he said, ‘I’ll answer, as best I personally know the answers.”

“Mospheira has… how many people?”

“About four million.”

“No atevi.”

“No atevi.”

“Have atevi ever come there, since the Treaty?”

“No, nadi. There haven’t. Except the airline crews.”

“What do you think of the concept of a paidhi‑atevi?”

“Early on, we wanted it. We tried to get it into the Treaty as a condition of the cease fire, because we wanted to understand atevi better than we did. We knew we’d misunderstood. We knew we were partially responsible for the War. But atevi refused. If atevi were willing, now, absolutely I’d support the idea.”

“You’ve nothing to hide, you as a people? It wouldn’t provoke resentment, to have an ateva resident on Mospheira, admitted to your councils?”

“I think it would be very useful for atevi to learn our customs. I’d sponsor it. I’d argue passionately in favor of it.”

“You don’t fear atevi spies any longer.”

“I’ve told you–there are no more secrets. There’s nothing to spy on. We live very similar lives. We have very similar conveniences. You wouldn’t know the difference between Adams Town and Shejidan.”

“I would not?”

“We’re very similar. And not–” he added deliberately, “not that all the influence has come from us to you, nadi. I tell you, we’ve found a good many atevi ideas very wise. You’d feel quite at home in some particulars. We have learned from you.”

He doubted Cenedi quite believed that. He saw the frown.

“Could there,” Cenedi asked him, “regarding the secrets you say you’ve provided–be any important area held back?”

“Biological research. Understanding of genetics. That’s the last, the most difficult.”

“Why is that the last?”

“Numbers. Like space. The size of the numbers. One hopes that computers will find more general acceptance among atevi. One needs computers, nadi, adept as you are in mathematics–you still need them. I confess I can’t follow everything you do in your heads, but you have to have the computers for space science, for record‑keeping, and for genetics as we practice it.”

“The number‑counters don’t believe that. Some say computers are inauspicious and misleading.”

“Some also do admit a fascination with them. I’ve heard some numerologists are writing software… and criticizing our hardware. They’re quite right. Our scientists are very interested in their opinions.”

“In atevi invention.”

“Very much so.”

“What can we possibly invent? Humans have done it all.”

“Oh, no, no, nadi, far from all. It’s a wide universe. And our ship did once break down.”

“Wide enough, this universe?”

He almost said–beyond calculation. But that was heresy. “At least beyond what I know, nadi. Beyond any limit we’ve found with our ships.”

“Is it? But what use is it?”

Occasionally he met a new atevi attitude–inevitably astonishing. “What use is the earth, nadi? What use is the whole world except that we’re in it? It’s where we are , nadi. Its use is that we exist. There may be more important positions in the universe, but from where we stand, it’s all that is important.”

“You believe that some things are uncountable?”

The heresy pit again. He reached for an irrefutable answer, knowing that, if the wrong thing went down on tape–the extremists had him. “If one had the vision to see them, I’m sure one could count them.”

“Does anyone have universal vision?”

Another atevi sect, for all he knew. “I wouldn’t know, nadi. I’m certainly not that person.”

Damned if Cenedi believed the numerologists. But what Cenedi might want for political reasons, he had no way to guess. He wanted out of this line of questioning.

“More tea?” Cenedi asked him.

“Nadi, thank you, I have some left.”

“Do you suspect me personally as an enemy?”

“I don’t know. I certainly hope not. I’ve found your company pleasant and I hope it to continue.”

“There is nothing personal in my position, nand’ paidhi.”

“I trust so. I don’t know how I could have offended you. Certainly not by intent.”

“Heresy is not the charge here, understand. I find all the number‑counting complete, primitive foolishness.”

“But tapes can be edited.”

“So can television,” Cenedi said. “You provided Tabini‑aiji with abundant material today.”

The television? He’d put it from his mind, in the shock of reading Tabini’s letter. But now that Cenedi said it, he factored it in with that letter–all the personal, easy questions, about himself, his life, his associations.

Double‑cross, by the only ateva he absolutely trusted with his life, double‑cross by the aiji who held all the agreements with human civilization.

Tabini had armed him against assassins–and in the light of that letter he couldn’t prove the assassins weren’t Tabini’s. Tabini gave him a gun that could be found and traced by the markings on its bullets.

But when he’d used it, and drawn blood, Banichi had given him another. He didn’t understand that.

Although perhaps Banichi hadn’t understood then, either, and done the loyal thing, not being in on the plot. All his reckonings ran in circles–and now Banichi’s gun was gone from under his mattress, when they could photograph anything, plant any piece of evidence, and fill in the serial numbers later… he knew at least some of the tricks they could use. He’d studied them. The administration had made him study them until his head rattled with them, and he hadn’t wanted to believe he’d ever need to know.

Not with Tabini, no.

Not with a man who confided in him, who told him official secrets he didn’t, out of respect for this man, convey to Mospheira… “How many people live on Mospheira?” Cenedi asked.

“You asked that, nadi. About four million. Four million three hundred thousand.”

“We’ll repeat questions from time to time, just to be sure.–Does that count children?”

Question after question, then, about support for the rail system, about the vetoes his predecessor had cast, about power plants, about dams and highways and the ecological studies, on Mospheira and on the mainland.

About the air link between the island and the mainland, and the road system in Mospheira’s highland north and center. Nothing at any point that was classified. Nothing they couldn’t find out from the catalogs and from his private mail, wherever that was going.

Probably they had found it out from his mail, long before the satellites. They might have, out of the vacation catalogs, assembled a mosaic of Mospheira’s roads, cities, streets, might have photographed the coastal cities, where regular cargo flights came in from Shejidan and flew out with human‑manufactured electronics, textiles, seafood and pharmaceuticals.

“Do you have many associates on Mospheira, nadi? What are their names?”

“What do you do regularly when you go back to Mospheira, nadi? Surely you spend some official time…?”

“You had a weapon in your quarters, nadi. What did you plan to do with it?”

Admit nothing, he thought. There was no friendly question.

“I’m unaware of any gun.”

“An object that size, under your mattress.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it arrived and departed the same day.”

“Please don’t joke, nadi. This is an extremely serious business.”

“I’m aware it is. But I assure you, I didn’t bring it here and I didn’t put it under my mattress.”

“It appeared spontaneously.”

“It must have. I’ve no other answer. Nadi, what would I do with it? I’m no marksman. I’m no danger with a gun, except to myself and the furniture.”

“Nadi. We know this gun didn’t originate in Malguri. We have its registration.”

He looked elsewhere, at the double‑edged shadows on the wall. Maybe Tabini had lost politically, somehow, in some way that mandated turning him over to a rival entity. He didn’t know who he was defending, now, in the matter of the disappearing gun, whether Tabini from his rivals or Banichi from prosecution, or whether Banichi’s substitution of that gun had muddied things up so badly that everyone looked guilty.

But he had no question now where the gun had gone.

And, as for lying, he adopted his own official line.

“Nadi,” Cenedi said. “Answer the question.”

“I thought it was a statement, nadi. Forgive me. I don’t own a gun. I didn’t put it there. That’s all I can say.”

“You fired at the assassin in Shejidan, nand’ paidhi.”

“No. I raised an alarm. Banichi fired when the man ran.”

“Banichi’s aim is not, then, what I’d expect of him.”

“It was dark, it was raining, and the man was running.”

“And there was no one but yourself in the room.”

“I heard a noise. I roused the guard.”

“Banichi regularly stands guard by your door at night?”

“I don’t know, I suppose he had some business in the halls–some lady. I didn’t ask him.”

“Nadi, you’re lying. This doesn’t help anyone.”

“Only three people in the world know what happened that night: myself, Banichi, and the man on that balcony–who was surely not you, Cenedi‑ji. Was it?”

“No. It’s not my method of choice.”

That was probably a joke. He didn’t know whether to take it as one. He was scared, and sure that Cenedi had information from sources he didn’t know about. Cenedi was building a case of some kind. And while there were laws against kidnapping, and against holding a person by force, there were none against what Tabini had done in sending him here.

“You have no idea how the gun got there,” Cenedi said. “You state emphatically that you didn’t know it was there.”

“Yes.”

Cenedi leaned back in his chair and stared at him, a long, long moment.

“Banichi gave you the gun.”

“No, nadi. He did not.”

“Nand’ paidhi, there are people of the dowager’s acquaintance, closely associated people, whose associations with Tabini‑aiji are through the aiji‑dowager. They don’t accept this piece of paper, this Treaty with Mospheira. Pieces of paper don’t impress them at all, and, quite frankly, they don’t consider the cession of Mospheira legitimate or effective.”

That crowd, he thought with a chill. The conservative fringe. The attack‑the‑beaches element. He didn’t want to believe it.

“We’ve received inquiry from them,” Cenedi said. “In fact, their agents have come to Malguri requesting you be turned over to them, urging the aiji‑dowager to abandon association with Tabini altogether. They argue the Treaty is valueless. That Tabini‑aiji is leading in a wrong direction. We’ve arranged a compromise. They need certain information, I’ve indicated we can obtain it for them, and they’ll not request you be turned over to them.”

It was a nightmare. He didn’t know what aspect of it to try to deal with. Finding out where Cenedi stood seemed foremost.

“Are you working for the aiji‑dowager, nadi?”

“Always. Without exception.”

“And what side is she taking? For or against Tabini?”

“She has no man’chi . She acts for herself.”

“To replace him?”

“That would be a possibility, nadi. She would do nothing that reduces her independence.”

Nothing that reduces her independence. Ilisidi had lost the election in the hasdrawad. Twice. Once five years ago, to Tabini.

And Tabini had to write that letter and send him to Ilisidi?

“Will you give me the statements I need, nand’ paidhi?”

It wasn’t an easy answer. Possibly–possibly Tabini hadn’t really betrayed him. Possibly Tabini’s administration was on its way down in defeat, and he’d never felt the earthquake. He couldn’t believe that. But atevi politics had confounded paidhiin before him.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Cenedi said. “These people have sent to Maiguri to bring you back to their authorities. If I give you over to them, I don’t say we can’t get you back–but in what condition I can hardly promise. They might carry their questioning much further, into technology, weapons, and space‑based systems, things in which we have no interest, and in which we have no reason to believe you haven’t told the truth. Please don’t delude yourself: this is not machimi, and no one keeps secrets from professionals. If you give me the statement I want, that will bring Tabini down, we can be cordial. If I can’t show them that–”

His mind was racing. He was losing bits of what Cenedi was saying, and that could be disastrous.

“–I’ve no choice but to let them obtain it their way. And I had much rather keep you from that, nand’ paidhi. Again: who fired the gun?”

“Banichi fired the gun.”

“Who gave you the gun?”

“No one gave me a gun, nadi.”

Cenedi sighed and pressed a button. Not a historical relic, a distracted corner of his mind objected. But probably a great deal else around Cenedi’s office wasn’t historical, or outmoded.

They waited. He could, he thought, change his mind. He could give Cenedi what he wanted, change sides–but he had Cenedi’s word… and that letter… to tell him what was really going on, and he didn’t believe it, not wholly. Tabini had been too canny, too much the politician, to go down without a maneuver tried, and he might, for all he knew, be a piece Tabini still counted his. Still relied on.

Which was stupid to think. If Tabini wanted him to take any active role in this, if that letter wasn’t to take seriously, Tabini could have told him, Banichi or Jago could have told him– someone could have told him what in hell they wanted him to do.

And he could have called his office, the way he was supposed to, and filed a report.

X

« ^ »

T he door behind him opened. He had no illusions about making an escape from Malguri–half the continent away from human territory, with no phone and no one to rely on except Jago and Banichi–and that was, perhaps, a chance; but out‑muscling two strong atevi who stood head and shoulders taller than he did, who loomed over him and laid hands on his arms as he got up from the chair… that hardly felt like a sane chance, either.

Cenedi looked at him, and said nothing as they took him out into the dim hall. They were taking him further back into Malguri’s farther wing, outside the territory he knew, farther and farther from the outside door, and he had at least a notion Banichi might be on the grounds, if Cenedi had told the truth, working wherever the power lines came into the building. He might reach Banichi, at least raise an alarm–if he could overpower two atevi, three, counting Cenedi, and one had better count Cenedi.

And get out of Cenedi’s hearing.

“I need the restroom,” he said, planting his feet, his heart beating like a hammer. It was stupid, but after two cups of tea, it was also the truth. “Just wait a damned minute, I need the restroom…”

“Restroom,” one said, and they brought him further down the hall to a backstairs room he judged must be under his own accommodation, and no more modern.

The one shut the outside door. The other stayed close to him, and stood by while he did what he’d complained he needed to, and washed his hands and desperately measured his chances against them. It had been a long time since he’d studied martial arts, a long time since he’d last worked out, and not so long for them, he was certain of that. He walked back toward the door in the hope the one would make the mistake of opening it in advance of him–the man didn’t, and that moment of transition was the only and last chance. He jabbed an elbow into the man at his left, tried to come about for a kick to clear the man from the door, and knew he was in trouble the split second before he found his wrist and his shoulder twisted around in a move that could break his arm.

“All right, all right,” he gasped, then had the unforgiving stone wall against the side of his face and found the breath he desperately needed to draw brought that trapped arm closer to breaking.

A lot of breathing then, theirs, his. The venue didn’t lend itself to complex reasoning, or argument about anything but the pain. He felt a cord come around his wrist, worse and worse, and he made another try at freeing himself as the one man opened the bathroom door. But the cord and the twist and lock on his arm gave the other guard a compelling argument.

He went where they wanted: it was all he could do–a short walk down the hall and to a doorway with lamplit stone steps leading downward to a basement he hadn’t known existed in Malguri. “I want to talk to Banichi,” he said at the top step, and balked.

Which convinced him they had no idea of the fragility of human joints and the guard was imminently, truly going to break the arm. He tried to take the step and missed it, lost his balance completely, and the guard shoved him along regardless, using the arm for leverage until he got his feet marginally under him and made the next several steps down on his own. Vision blurred, a teary haze of lamplight from a single hanging source. Stone walls, no furniture but that solitary, hanging oil lamp and a table and chair. Thunder shook the stones, even this deep into the rock, seeming like a last message from the outside world. There was another doorway, open on a dark corridor. They shoved him at it.

There wasn’t any help. Unless Banichi was on some side of this he couldn’t figure, there wasn’t going to be any. He’d lost his best bid, thrown it away in a try at fighting two atevi hand to hand–but if he could get leverage to get free… before they could get a door shut on him–and he could get the door behind them shut–

It wasn’t a good chance. It wasn’t any chance. But he was desperate as they took him aside, through a door into a dark cell with no light except from the room down the hall. He figured they meant to turn him loose here, and he prepared to come back at them, duck low and see if he could get past them.

But when the guard let go, he kept the wrist cord, swung him about by that and backed him against the wall while his fellow grabbed the other arm. He kicked and got a casual knee in the gut for his trouble, the atevi having their hands full.

“Don’t,” that one said, while he was trying to get his wind back. “No more, do you hear me?”

After which they hooked his feet out from under him, stretched his one arm out along a metal bar, while the second guard pulled the other arm in the other direction, and tied it tight with cord from wrist to elbow.

For most of it, he was still trying to breathe–damned mess, was all he could think, over and over, classic atevi way of handling a troublesome case, only the bar wasn’t average human height and he couldn’t get his knees on the ground or his feet under him. Just not damned comfortable, he thought–couldn’t get out of it by any means he could think of–couldn’t even find a place to put his knees to protect vital parts of his body from the working‑over he expected.

But they went away and left him instead, without a word, only brushing off their hands and dusting their clothes, as if he had ruffled their dignity. He dreaded their shutting the door and leaving him in the dark… but they left it as it was, so there was an open door within sight, and their shadows retreating on the hall floor outside. He heard their voices echoing, the two of them talking about having a drink, in the way of workmen with a job finished.

He heard them go away up the steps, and heard the door shut.

After that was–just–silence.

They had told him at the very outset of his training, that if the situation ever really blew up like this, suicide was a job requirement. They didn’t want a human in atevi hands spilling technological information ad lib and indefinitely–a very serious worry early on, when atevi hadn’t reached the political stability they had had for a century, and when rivalry between associations had been a constant threat to the Treaty… oh, no, it couldn’t happen, not in remotest imagination.

But they still taught the course–he knew a dozen painless methods–and they still said, if there was no other option, take it–because there was no rescue coming and no way anyone would risk the peace to bring him out.

Not that there was much he could tell anybody, except political information against Tabini. Technology nowadays was so esoteric the paidhi didn’t know it until he had his briefing on Mospheira, and he worked at it until he could translate it and make sense of it to atevi experts. There was no way they could beat atomic secrets out of him, no more than he could explain trans‑light technology.