Foreigner

But he couldn’t let them use him politically, either–couldn’t make statements for them to edit and twist out of context, not without marks on him to show the world he was under duress.

And he’d made the television interview–sitting there quite at ease in front of the cameras.

He’d let Cenedi get his answers on tape, including his damning refusal to attribute the gun. They had all the visuals and sound bites they could want.

Damn, he thought. He’d screwed it. He’d screwed it beyond any repair. Hanks was in charge, as of now, and damn, he wished there was better, and more imaginative, and somebody to realize Tabini was still the best bet they had.

Overthrow Tabini, replace him with the humanophobes, and him with Deana Hanks, and watch everything generations had built go to absolute hell. He believed it. And the hard‑liners among humans who thought he’d gotten entirely too friendly with Tabini… they weren’t right, he refused to believe they were right; but they’d have their field day saying so.

The irony was, the hard‑liners, the nuke‑the‑opposition factions, were alike on both sides of the strait. And he couldn’t turn the situation over to them.

Mistake to have taken himself out of Cenedi’s hands. He believed that now. He had to tough it out somehow, find out if Banichi was involved, or a prisoner, or what–get them to bring Cenedi back in, get the ear of somebody who’d listen to reason.

Plenty of time for the mind to race over plans and plans and plans.

But when the cold got into his bones and the muscles started to stiffen and then to hurt–the mind found other things to occupy it besides plans for how to fix what he’d screwed up, the mind found the body was damned uncomfortable, and it hurt, and he might never get out of this cellar if he didn’t give these people everything they wanted.

But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, hadn’t done his job half right or he wouldn’t be here, but he wasn’t going to finish it by bringing Tabini down.

Only hope he had, he kept telling himself. Tabini was a canny son of a bitch when he had to be. Damn him, he’d given up a card he’d known he had to cede– knew humans wouldn’t fight over him; and having not a human bone in his body, didn’t feel what a human would. He’d gotten his television interview. He’d show the world and the humans that Bren Cameron was well‑disposed to him–he’d slipped that television crew in neatly as could be and gotten his essential interview just before the other side moved in their agents with their demands on Ilisidi, who was probably fence‑sitting and playing neutral.

Check, and mate.

Put him in one hell of a position, Tabini had. Thanks a lot, he thought. Thanks a lot, Tabini.

But we need you. Peace–depends on you staying in power. You know they’ll replace me. Give you a brand new paidhi, a new quantity for the number‑counters to figure out and argue over. Switch the dice on them–leave them with a new puzzle and humans not reacting the way atevi would.

You son of a bitch , Tabini‑ji.

The time seemed to stretch into hours, from terror to pain, to boredom and an acute misery of stiffened muscles, numb spots, cold metal and cold stone. He didn’t hear the thunder anymore. He couldn’t find an angle to put his legs that didn’t hurt his back or his knees or his shoulders, and every try hurt.

Imagination in the quiet and the dark was no asset at all–too much television, Banichi would tell him.

But Banichi had either turned coat–which meant Banichi’s man’chi had always been something other than even Tabini thought–or Banichi had landed in the same trouble as he was.

In his fondest hope, Banichi or Jago would come through that door and cut him free before the opposition put him on their urgent list. Maybe the delay in dealing with him was because they were looking for Banichi and Jago. Maybe Jago’s quick exit when he’d last talked with her, and that com message from Banichi–had been because Banichi knew something, and Banichi had called her, knowing they had to be free in order to do anything to free him…

It was a good machimi plot, but it didn’t happen. It wasn’t going to happen. He just hung there and hurt in various sprained places, and finally heard the outer hall door open.

Footsteps descended the stone steps into the outer room–two sets of footsteps, or three, he wasn’t entirely sure, then decided on three: he heard voices, saying something he couldn’t make out. He reached a certain pitch of panic fear, deciding whatever was going to happen was about to happen. But no one came, so he thought the hell with it and let his head fall forward, which could relieve the ache in his neck for maybe five minutes at a time.

Then voices he’d decided were going to stay in the next room became noises in the hall; and when he looked up, a shadow walked in–someone in guard uniform, he couldn’t see against the light, but he could see the sparks of metal off the shadows that filled his field of vision.

“Good evening,” he said to his visitor. “Or is it the middle of the night?”

The shadow left him, and nerves ratcheted to the point of pain began a series of tremors that he decided must be the stage before paralysis set into his legs, like that in his fingers. He didn’t want that. He hoped maybe that was just a guard checking on him, and they’d go away.

The steps came back. He was supposed to be scared by this silent coming and going, he decided–and that, with the pain, made him mad. He’d hoped to get to mad… he always found a state of temper more comforting than a state of terror.

But this time more arrived, bringing a wooden chair from somewhere, and a tape recorder–all of them shadows casting other shadows in the light from the doorway. The recorder cast a shadow, too, and a red light glowed on it when one of them bent and pressed the button.

“Live, on tape,” he said. He saw no reason to forbear anything, and he stayed angry, now, though on the edge of terror. He’d not deserved this, he told himself–not deserved it of Tabini, or Cenedi, or Ilisidi. “So who are you? What do you want, nadi? Anything reasonable? I’m sure not.”

“No fear at all?” the shadow asked him. “No remorse, no regret?”

“What should I regret, nadi? Relying on the dowager’s hospitality? If I’ve passed my welcome here, I apologize, and I’d like to–leave–”

One shadow separated itself from the others, picked up the chair, turned it quietly face about and sat down, arms folded on the low back.

“Where did you get the gun?” this shadow asked, a stranger’s voice,

“I didn’t have a gun. Banichi fired. I didn’t.”

“Why would Banichi involve himself? And why did it turn up in your bed?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Has Banichi ever gone with you to Mospheira?”

“No.”

“Gone to Mospheira at all?”

“No. No ateva has, in my lifetime.”

“You’re lying about the gun, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said.

The tic in his left leg started again. He tried to stay calm and to think, while the questions came one after the other and periodically circled back to the business of the gun.

The tape ran out, and he watched them replace it. The tic never let up. Another one threatened, in his right arm, and he tried to change position to relieve it.

“What do you project,” the next question was, on a new tape, “on future raw metals shipments to Mospheira? Why the increase?”

“Because Mospheira’s infrastructure is wearing out.” It was the pat answer, the simplistic answer. “We need the raw metals. We have our own processing requirements.”

“And your own launch site?”

Wasn’t the same question. His heart skipped a beat. He knew he took too long. “What launch site?”

“We know. You gave us satellites. Shouldn’t we know?”

“Don’t launch from Mospheira latitude. Can’t. Not practical.”

“Possible. Practical, if that’s the site you have. Or do any boats leave Mospheira that don’t have to do with fishing?”

What damned boats? he asked himself. If there was anything, he didn’t know it, and he didn’t rule that out. “We’re not building any launch site, nadi, I swear to you. If we are, the paidhi isn’t aware of it.”

“You slip numbers into the dataflow. You encourage sectarian debates to delay us. Most clearly you’re stockpiling metals. You increase your demands for steel, for gold–you give us industries, and you trade us micro‑circuits for graphite, for titanium, aluminum, palladium, elements we didn’t know existed a hundred years ago and, thanks to you, now we have a use for. Now you import them, minerals that don’t exist on Mospheira. For what? For what do you use these things, if not the same things you’ve taught us to use them for, for light‑lift aircraft you don’t fly, for–”

“I’m not an engineer. I’m not expert in our manufacturing. I know we use these things in electronics, in high‑strength steel for industry–”

“And light‑lift aircraft? High‑velocity fan blades for jets you don’t manufacture?”

He shook his head, childhood habit. It meant nothing to atevi. He was in dire trouble, and he couldn’t tell anybody who urgently needed to know the kind of suspicions atevi were entertaining. He feared he wouldn’t have the chance to tell anybody outside this room if he didn’t come up with plausible, cooperative answers for this man.

“I’ve no doubt–no doubt there are experimental aircraft. We haven’t anything but diagrams of what used to exist. We build test vehicles. Models. We test what we think we understand before we give advice that will let some ateva blow himself to bits, nadi, we know the dangers of these propellants and these flight systems–”

“Concern for us.”

“Nadi, I assure you, we don’t want some ateva blowing up a laboratory or falling out of the sky and everybody saying it was our fault. People find fault with the programs. There are enough people blaming us for planes that don’t file flight plans and city streets piled full of grain because the agriculture minister thought the computer was making up the numbers–damned right we have test programs. We try to prevent disasters before we ask you to risk your necks–it’s not a conspiracy, it’s public relations!”

“It’s more than tests,” the interrogator said. “The aiji is well aware. Is he not?”

“He’s not aware. I’m not aware. There is no launch site. There’s nothing we’re holding back, there’s nothing we’re hiding. If they’re building planes, it’s a test program.”

“Who gave you the gun, nadi?”

“Nobody gave me a gun. I didn’t even know it was under my mattress. Ask Cenedi how it got there.”

“Who gave it to you, nadi‑ji? Just give us an answer. Say, The aiji gave it to me, and you can go back to bed and not be concerned in this.”

“I don’t know. I said I don’t know.”

The man nearest drew a gun. He saw the sheen on the barrel in the almost dark. The man moved closer and he felt the cold metal against his face. Well, he thought, That’s what we want, isn’t it? No more questions.

“Nand’ paidhi,” the interrogator said. “You say Banichi fired the shots at the intruder in your quarters. Is that true?”

Past a certain point, to hell with the game. He shut his eyes and thought about the snow and the sky around winter slopes. About the wind, and nobody else in sight.

Told him something, that did, that it wasn’t Barb his mind went to. If it mattered. It was, however, a curious, painful discovery.

“Isn’t that true, nand’ paidhi?”

He declined to answer. The gun barrel went away. A powerful hand pulled his head up and banged it against the wall.

“Nand’paidhi. Tabini‑aiji has renounced you. He’s given your disposition into our hands. You’ve read the letter. Have you not?”

“Yes.”

“What is our politics to you?–Let him go, nadi. Let go. All of you, wait outside.”

The man let him go. They changed the rules of a sudden. The rest of them filed out the door, letting light past, so that he could see at least the outlined edges of the interrogator’s face, but he didn’t think he knew the man. He only wondered what the last‑ditch proposition was going to be, or what the man had to offer him he wasn’t going to say with the others there. He wasn’t expecting to like it.

The interrogator reached down and cut off the recorder. It was very quiet in the cell, then, for a long, long wait.

“Do you think,” the man said finally, “that we dare release you now, nand’ paidhi, to go back to Mospheira? On the other hand, if you provided the aiji‑dowager the necessary evidence to remove the aiji, if you became a resource useful on our side–we’d be fools to turn you over to more radical factions of our association.”

“Cenedi said the same thing. And sent me here.”

“We support the aiji‑dowager. We’d keep you alive and quite comfortable, nand’ paidhi. You could go back to Shejidan. Nothing essential would change in the relations of the association with Mospheira–except the party in power. If you’re telling the truth, and you don’t know the other information we’d like to have, we’re reasonable. We can accept that, so long as you’re willing to provide us statements that serve our point of view. It costs you nothing. It maintains you in office, nand’ paidhi. All for a simple answer. What do you say?” The interrogator bent, complete shadow again, and turned the tape recorder back on. “Who provided you the gun, nand’ paidhi?”

“I never had a gun,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The interrogator cut off the tape recorder, picked it up, got up, and left him.

He hung against the bar, shaking, telling himself he’d just been a complete fool, telling himself Tabini didn’t deserve a favor that size, if there was a real chance that he could get himself out of this alive, stay in office, and go back to dealing with Mospheira, business as usual–

The hell they’d let him. Trust was a word you couldn’t translate. But atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.

He expected the guards would come back, maybe shoot him, maybe take him somewhere else, to the less reasonable people the man had talked about. If you had a potential informer, you didn’t turn him over to rival factions. No. It was all Cenedi. It was all the dowager. All the same game, no matter the strategy. It just got rougher. Cenedi had warned him that people didn’t hold out.

He heard someone go out of the room down the hall, heard the doors shut, and in the long, long silence asked himself how bad it could get–and had ugly, ugly answers out of the machimi. He didn’t like to think about that. Breathing hurt, now, but he couldn’t feel his legs.

A long while later the outer room door opened. Again the footsteps, descending the stone steps–he listened to them, drawing quick, shallow breaths that didn’t give him enough oxygen, watched the shadows come down the darker corridor, and tried to keep his wits about him–find a point of negotiation, he said to himself. Engage the bastards, just to get them talking–stall for time in which Hanks or Tabini or somebody could do something.

The guards walked in.–Cenedi’s, he was damned sure, now.

“Tell Cenedi I’ve decided,” he said, as matter of factly as if it was his office and they’d shown up to collect the message. “Maybe we can find an agreement. I need to talk to him. I’d rather talk to him.”

“That’s not our business,” one said–and he recognized the attitude, the official hand‑washing, the atevi official who’d taken a position, broken off negotiations, and told his subordinates to stonewall attempts, officially. Cenedi might have given orders not to hear about the methods.

He didn’t take Cenedi for that sort. He thought Cenedi would insist to know what his subordinates did.

“There’s an intermediate position,” he said. “Tell him there’s a way to solve this.” Anything to get Cenedi to send for him.

But the guards had other orders. They started untying his arms. Going to take him somewhere else, then. Inside Malguri, please God.

Four of them to handle him. Ludicrous. But his legs weren’t working well. One foot was asleep. His hands wouldn’t work. He tried to get up before they found a way of their own, and two of them dragged him up and locked arms behind him to hold him on his feet, although one of them could have carried him. “Sorry,” he said, with the foot collapsing at every other step as they took him out the door, and he felt the fool for opening his mouth–he was so damned used to courtesies, and they seemed so damned useless now. “Just tell Cenedi,” he said as they were going down the corridor. “Where are we going?”

“Nand’ paidhi, just walk. We’re ordered not to answer you.”

Which meant they wouldn’t. They owed him nothing. That they gave him back courtesy was comforting, at least indicating that they didn’t personally hold a grudge, but it didn’t mean a thing beyond that. Man’chi was everything–wherever theirs was, you couldn’t argue that.

At least they took him up the steps, into the hall. He held out a hope they might pass Cenedi’s office, and they did–but that door was shut, and no light showed under it. Damn, he thought, one more hope gone to nothing–it shook him, ever so small a shaking of his remaining understanding, but the thoughts kept wanting to scatter to what was happening, what might happen, whose these men were–and that wasn’t important, because he couldn’t do anything about it. He could sort through the questions they’d asked, and try to figure what they would ask–that… that was the only thing that would do any good; and he couldn’t trust that the persistent question about the gun was even the important one–it might be what they wanted him to focus on while they chipped away at what he did know… while they figured out where the limits of his knowledge were and how useful he was likely to be to them.

There wasn’t any damned launch facility–that was the scariest question, and they were wrong about that, they had to be wrong about that: he couldn’t make it true by any stretch of the imagination. But the stockpiling–they had the trade figures. He couldn’t lie about that. Atevi had finally gotten the lesson humans had taught, knew they were accumulating materials useful in certain kinds of development, and he could tell them far too much, if they asked the right questions and used the right drugs. Cenedi had said the same thing his own administrators had said: he wasn’t going to be any hero, unless he could think of a better lie than he’d thought of, impromptu, already… and build on what he’d said.

God, only hope tying the gun to Tabini was their immediate objective, and not the rest of it–they hadn’t beaten Tabini, couldn’t have, and still be asking what they were asking–

But he couldn’t give them any more on that score.

Couldn’t. Daren’t. Couldn’t play the game down that dangerous path. He needed to use his head, and his head wasn’t all that clear at the moment–he hurt, and the thoughts went tumbling and skittering at every distraction, into what might happen and what he could do and daren’t do and how much choice he might have.

They brought him around by the kitchens, and down the corridor to the stairs he’d once suspected might be wired–Ilisidi’s back stairs, her apartment, and her wing of the fortress, completely away from the rest of Malguri.

“Banichi!” he yelled as they began that climb–and his guards took a numbing, tighter grip on him. “Banichi! Tano! Help!” He shoved to pitch them all down the stairs–grabbed the railing with one hand and couldn’t hold on to it. One guard got an arm around him, tore him loose and squeezed the breath out of him as his partner recovered his balance.

“Banichi!” he yelled till his throat cracked; but he wasn’t strong enough to throw them once they were on their guard. They carried him upstairs between them, and down the upstairs hall, and through the massive doors to liisidi’s apartments.

Thick doors. Soundproof doors, once they shut. Ilisidi’s premises smelled of floral scent, of wood fire, of lamp oil. There was no more point in fighting them. He caught his breath and went on his own feet as best he could–he’d done his best and his worst: he let them steer him without violence, now that they were out of hearing of help–across polished wooden floors and antique carpets, past delicate furniture and priceless art and, as everywhere in Malguri, the heads of dead animals–some extinct, hunted out of existence.

A gasping breath caught the clean, cold scent of rain‑washed air. Windows or balcony doors were open somewhere, wafting a breeze through the rooms, the next of which were in shadow, lamps unlit, air colder and colder as they went, finally through a dark drawing room he remembered, and toward the open‑air chill of the balcony.

A table was set there, in the dark–a dark figure, hair streaked with white, sat having tea and toast, wrapped in robes against the cold. Ilisidi looked up at their intrusion on her before‑dawn breakfast and, quite, quite madly, to his eyes, waved a gesture toward the empty chair, while icy gusts whipped at the lace table‑covering.

“Good morning,” she said, “nand’ paidhi. Sit. What lovely hair you have. Does it curl on its own?”

He fell into the chair as the guards deposited him there. His braid had come completely undone. His hair flew in the wind that whipped the steam off Ilisidi’s cup. Guards stood behind his chair while the dowager’s servant poured him a cup. The wind took that steam, too, chilling him to the bone as it skirled in off the shadowed lake, out of the mountains. The faintest redness of dawn showed in the lowest notches.

“It’s the hour for ghosts,” Ilisidi said. “Do you believe in them?”

He caught a quick, cold breath–caught up the pieces of his sanity… and engaged.

“I believe in unrewarded duty, nand’ dowager. I believe in treachery, and invitations one shouldn’t take at face value.–Come aboard my ship, said the lady to the fisherman.” He picked up the teacup in a shaking hand. Tea spilled, scalding his fingers, but he carried it to his lips and sipped it. He tasted only sweet. “Not Cenedi’s brew. What effect does this one have?”

“Such a prideful lad. I heard you enjoyed sweets.–Hear the bell?”

He did. The buoy bell, he supposed, far out in the lake,

“When the wind blows, it carries it,” Ilisidi said, wrapped in her robes, and wrapping them closer. “Warning of rocks. We had the idea long before you came bringing gifts.”

“I’ve no doubt. Atevi had found so much before us.”

“Shipwrecked, were you? Is that still the story? No buoy bells?”

“Too far from our ordinary routes,” he said, and took another, warming sip, while the wind cut through his shirt and trousers. Shivers made him spill scalding liquid on his fingers as he set the cup down. “Off our charts. Too far to see the stars we knew.”

“But close enough for this one.”

“Eventually. When we were desperate.” The ringing came and went by turns, on the tricks of the wind. “We never meant to harm anyone, nand’dowager. That’s still the truth.”

“Is it?”

“When Tabini sent me to you–he said I’d need all my diplomacy. I didn’t understand, then. I understood his grandmother was simply difficult.”

Ilisidi gave him no expression, none that human eyes could see in the dim morning. But she might have been amused. Ilisidi was frequently amused at such odd points. The cold had penetrated all the way to his brain, maybe, or it was the tea: he found no particular terror left, with her.

“Do you mind telling me,” he asked her above the wind, “what you’re after? Launch sites on Mospheira is a piece of nonsense. Wrong latitude. Ships leaving for other places is the same. So, is arresting me just politics, or what?”

“My eyes aren’t what they were. When I was your age I could see your orbiting station. Can you, from here?”

He turned his head toward the sun, toward the mountains, searching above the peaks for a star that didn’t twinkle, a star shining with reflected sunlight.

His vision blurred on him. He saw it distorted, and he looked instead for dimmer, neighboring stars. He had no trouble seeing them, the sky was still so dark, without electric lights to haze the dawn with city‑glow.

And when he looked fixedly at the station he could still see its deformation, as if–he feared at first thought–it had yawed out of its habitual plane, making a minute exaggeration of its round into an ellipse.

Was it possibly the central mast coming into view? The station tilted radically out of plane?

Logical explanations chased through his head–the station further along to deterioration than they had reckoned, a solar storm, maybe–and Mospheira might be transmitting like mad, trying to salvage it. It would engage atevi notice: they had perfectly adequate optics.

Maybe it was some solar panel come loose from the station and catching the sun. The station rotated once every so many minutes. If it was something loose, it ought to go away and come back.

“Well, nand’ paidhi?”

He got up from his chair and stared at it, trying not to blink, trying until his eyes hurt in the gusts that blasted cold through his clothing.

But it didn’t do those things–didn’t dim, or change. It remained a steady, minute irregularity that stayed on the same side of a station that was supposed to be spinning on its axis… slower and slower over the centuries, as entropy had its way, but–

But, he thought, my God, not in my lifetime, the station wasn’t supposed to break apart, barring total, astronomical calamity…

And it wouldn’t just hang there like that–unless I am looking at the mast…

He took a step toward the balcony. Atevi hands moved to stop him, and held his arms, but it wasn’t flinging himself off the side of Malguri that he had in mind, it was insulation from the very faint light still reaching them from the farther rooms. He still couldn’t resolve it. His brain kept trying to make sense out of the configuration.

“Eight days ago,” Ilisidi said, “this–appeared and joined the station.”

Appeared.

Joined the station,

Oh, my God, my God–

XI

« ^ »

T ransmissions between Mospheira and the station have been frequent,” Ilisidi said. “An explanation, nand’paidhi. What do you see?”

“It’s the ship. Our ship–at least, some ship–”

He was speaking his own language. His legs were numb. He couldn’t trust himself to walk–it was a good thing the guards caught his arms and steered him back to safety at the table.

But they didn’t let him sit. They faced him toward Ilisidi, and held him there.

“Some call it treachery, nand’ paidhi. What do you call it?”

Eight days ago. The emergency return, bringing him and Tabini back from Taiben. The cut‑off of his mail. Banichi and Jago with him constantly.

“Nand’ paidhi? Tell me what you see.”

“A ship,” he managed to say in their language–he was bone‑cold, incapable of standing, except for the atevi hands holding him. He was almost incapable of speaking, the breath was so short in his chest. “It’s the ship that left us here, aiji‑mai, that’s all I can think.”

“Many of us think many more things,” Ilisidi said, “nand’ paidhi. What do you suppose they’re saying… this supposed ship… and your people across the strait? Do you suppose we figure in these conversations at all?”

He shivered and looked at the sky again, thinking, It’s impossible–

And looked at Ilisidi, a darkness in the dawn, except only the silver in her hair and the liquid anger in her eyes.

“Aiji‑mai, I don’t understand. I didn’t know this was happening. No one expected it. No one told me.”

“Oh, this is a little incredible, paidhi‑ji, that no one knew, that this appearance in our skies is so totally, utterly a surprise to you.”

“Please.” His legs were going. The blood was cut off to his hands. For what he knew, the dowager would have the guards pitch him off the edge from here, a gesture of atevi defiance, in a war the world couldn’t win, a war the paidhiin were supposed to prevent. “Nand’ dowager, I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t expect this. But I know why they’re here. I know the things you want to know.”

“Do you, now. And the paidhiin are only interpreters.”

“And human, aiji‑mai. I know what’s going on up there, the way I know what humans did in the past and what they want for the future–nothing in their plans is to your detriment.”

“As the station wasn’t. As your coming here wasn’t. As your interference in our affairs wasn’t, and your domination of our trade, our invention, our governance of ourselves wasn’t. You led us to the technology you wanted, you lent us the industry you needed, you perverted our needs to your programs, you pushed us into a future of television and computers and satellites, all of which we grow to love, oh, to rely on–and forget every aspect of our own past, our own laws, our own course that we would have followed to use our own resources. We are not so stupid, nand’ paidhi, not so stupid as to have destroyed ourselves as you kept counseling us we would do without your lordly help, we are not so stupid as to believe we weren’t supplying you with materials for which you had your own uses, in an agenda we hadn’t set. Tabini placed great confidence in you–too damned much confidence in you. When he knew what had happened he sent you to me, as someone with her wits still about her, someone who hasn’t spent her life in Shejidan watching television and growing complacent. So tell me your truth, nand’ paidhi! Give me your assurances! Tell me why all the other lies are justified and why the truth in our skies this morning is good for us!”

The blasts of wind came no colder than Ilisidi’s anger. It was the truth, all of it, all justified, he knew that the way he’d known the unspoken truth of his dealings with atevi–that the paidhiin were doing the best they could do in a bad bargain, keeping a peace that wasn’t viable between ordinary people of their two species, saving what they’d almost entirely destroyed, things like this reality around him, the ancient stones, the lake, the order of life in an atevi fortress, remote from the sky and the stars he couldn’t reach from here. He looked up at that truth and the lights blurred in his eyes. The wind gave him no direction, whether up or down, whether he was falling into the sky or standing on stones he couldn’t feel. He was afraid–terrified as atevi must be of that human presence up there–and didn’t comprehend why.

“Aiji‑mai, I can’t say it’s good that it’s there, it’s just there, it’s just what’s happened, and if you kill me, it won’t make anything any better than it is. Mospheira didn’t plan this. Yes, we’ve guided your technology–we wanted to get back into space, aiji‑mai, we didn’t have the resources ourselves, our equipment was half‑destroyed, and we didn’t think the ship still existed. We took a chance coming down here–it was a disaster for us and for you. Two hundred years we’ve worked to get back up there, and we never wanted to destroy the atevi–only to give you the same freedom we want for ourselves.”

“Damned nice of you. Did you ask?”

“We were naive. But we hadn’t a choice as we saw it, and we hadn’t a way to leave once we were down. It’s easier to fall onto a planet than to fly free of one. It was our calculated decision, aiji‑mai, and we thought we could build our way back to space and bring atevi with us. We never intended to go to war–we didn’t want to take anything from you…”

“Baji‑naji, nand’ paidhi. Fortune has a human face and bastard Chance whores drunken down your streets.–Let him go, nadiin. Let him go where he likes. If you want to go down to the township, nand’ paidhi,–there’s a car that can take you.”

He blinked into the wind, staggering in a freedom that all but dumped him down to his knees. The guards’ grip lingered, keeping him steady. It was all that did. It was like the other crazed things Ilisidi had done–sending him out of here, setting him free.

But he didn’t know he’d reach the airport. She didn’t promise more than freedom to leave Malguri. She didn’t say his leaving was what she wanted– If you want to go still rang in his ears; and she’d given him crazy signals before this, challenging him to stay behind her–atevi‑fashion: follow me if you dare.

He shook off the guards and stumbled forward to grab the vacant chair at the table, as guns came out and safeties went off. He slid it back and fell into it, too cold to feel the lace‑covered glass under his arms, his sense of balance tilting this way and that on this narrow strip of a balcony.

“Tabini sent me here ,” he said. “Aiji‑mai, your grandson couldn’t believe his own judgement, so he sent me here , relying on yours. So I do rely on it. What do you want me to do?”

A long, long moment Ilisidi stared at him, a shadow wrapped in robes, immune to the cold. He was too cold to shiver. He only flinched in the blasts and hunched his arms together. But he didn’t doubt what he was doing. He didn’t doubt the challenge Ilisidi had laid in front of him, offering him an escape–by everything he’d learned of her and of atevi, Ilisidi would write off him and every human alive if he took her up on that invitation to escape.

“In reasonable fear of harm,” Ilisidi said finally, “you would not give us a simple statement against my grandson. In pain, you refused to give it. What good is man’chi to a human?”

“Every good.” Of a sudden it was dazzlingly, personally clear to him. “A place to stand. An understanding of who I am, and where I am. If Tabini‑aiji sent me here, he relied on your judgement–of me, of the situation, of the use I am to him.”

Another long silence. “I’m old‑fashioned. Impractical. Without appreciation of the modern world. What can my grandson possibly want from me?”

“Evidently,” he said, and found, after all, the capacity to shiver, “evidently he’s come to value your opinion.”

Ilisidi’s mouth made a hard line. That curved. “In Maidingi there are people waiting for you–who expect me to turn you over to them, who demand it, in fact–people who rely on me as my grandson hasn’t. Your choice to stay here–is wise. But what excuse for holding you should I tell them, nadi?”

The shivers had become violent. He gave a shake of his head, tried to answer, wasn’t sure Ilisidi wanted an answer. The rim of the sun cast a sudden, fierce gleam over the mountains across the lake, flaming gold.

“This young man is freezing,” Ilisidi said. “Get him inside. Hot tea. Breakfast. I don’t know when he may get another.”

When he may get another? He wanted explanation, but Ilisidi’s bodyguard hauled him out of his chair–the ones he knew, who knew him, not the ones who had brought him from below. He couldn’t coordinate his getting up. He couldn’t walk without staggering, the cold had set so deeply into his joints. “My apartment,” he protested. “I want to talk to Banichi. Or Jago.”

Ilisidi said nothing to that request, and the guards took him from the balcony into the dead air of the inside, guided him by the arms through the antiques and the delicate tables–opened a door to a firelit room, Ilisidi’s study, he supposed, by the books and the papers about. They brought him to the chair before the fire, wrapped a robe about him and let him sit down and huddle in the warmthless wool. They piled more logs on the fire, sent embers flying up the chimney, and he was still numb, scarcely feeling the heat on the soles of his boots.

A movement in the doorway caught his eye. Cenedi was watching him silently. How long Cenedi had been there he had no idea. He stared back, dimly realizing that Cenedi along with Ilisidi had just gained his agreement–and Cenedi had arranged the whole damned shadow‑show.

Cenedi only nodded as if he’d seen what he came to see, and left, without a word.

Anger sent a shiver through him, and he hugged the robe closer to hide the reaction. One of Ilisidi’s guards–he remembered the name as Giri–had lingered, working with the fire. Giri looked askance at him. “There’s another blanket, nadi,” Giri said, and in his sullen silence got up and brought it and put it over him. “Thin folk chill through faster,” Giri said. “Do you want the tea, nand’ paidhi? Breakfast?”

“No. Enough tea. Thank you.” Cenedi’s presence had upset his stomach. He told himself–intellectually–that Cenedi could have done him far greater hurt: Cenedi could have put enough pressure on to make him confess anything Cenedi wanted. He supposed Cenedi had done him a favor, getting what he needed and no more than that.

But he couldn’t be that charitable, with the livid marks of atevi fingers on his arms. He’d little dignity left. He made a desultory, one‑handed twist of his hair at the nape of his neck–he wanted to make a plait or two to hold it, but the arm they’d twisted wouldn’t lift while he was shivering. He was angry, in pain, and in the dim, dazed way his brain was working, he didn’t know who to blame for it: not Cenedi, ultimately; not Ilisidi–not even Tabini, who had every good reason to suspect human motives, with the evidence of human space operations over his head and his own government tottering around him.

While he’d been doing television interviews with newscasters and talking to tourists who hadn’t said a damned thing about it.

His office had probably rung the phone off the desk trying to get hold of him, but atevi news was controlled. Nothing of that major import got out until Tabini wanted it released, not in this Association and not in others: atevi notions of priority and public rights and the duties of aijiin to manage the public welfare took precedence over democracy.

The tourists might not have known, if they hadn’t been near a television for some number of days. Even the television crew might not have known. The dissidents who must have gravitated to Ilisidi as a rival to Tabini… they would have had their sources, in the hasdrawad, in the way atevi associations had no borders. They would have wanted to get to the paidhi and the information he had, urgently. At any cost.

Maybe the rival factions had wanted to silence his advice, the character of which they might believe they knew without hearing him.

Or maybe they had wanted something else. Maybe there had never been an assassination attempt against him–maybe they’d wanted to snatch him away to question, to find out what a human would say and what it meant to their position, before Tabini took some action they didn’t know how to judge.

Tabini had ordered their rushed and early return from Taiben–after arming him against the logical actions of the people Tabini already intended to send him to?

Had the attempt on his bedroom been real in any sense–or something Tabini himself had done for an excuse?

And why did someone of Banichi’s rank just happen to be in his wing that night? The cooks and the clerks didn’t merit Banichi’s level of security. It was his room they’d been guarding–Tabini had already been advised of the goings‑on in the heavens.

But somebody of Banichi’s experience let a man he was guarding sleep with the garden doors and the lattice open?

Things blurred. He felt a clamminess in his hands, was overwhelmed, of a sudden, with anger at the games‑playing. He’d believed Cenedi. He’d believed the game in the cellar, when they’d put the gun to his head–they’d made him think he was going to die, and in such a moment, dammit, he’d have thought he’d think of Barb, he’d have thought he’d think of his mother or Toby or someone human, but he hadn’t. They’d made him stand face‑to‑face with that disturbing, personal moment of truth, and he hadn’t discovered any noble sentiments or even human reactions. The high snows and the sky was all he’d been able to see, being alone was all he could imagine–just the snow, just the sky and the cold, up where he went to have his solitude from work and his own family’s clamoring demands for his time, that was the truth they’d pushed him to, not a warm human thought in him, no love, no humanity–

His hand flew up to his face scarcely in time to bury the sudden rush of helpless, watery reaction that he told himself at once was nerves, the psychological crash after the crisis–that, at least, was human, if anything he did was human, or natural, if anything he did was anything but one damned calculated move after technologically, politically calculated move–

“Nadi.” Giri was hovering over him. He didn’t know Giri. Giri didn’t know him. Giri just saw the paidhi acting oddly, and the dowager didn’t want him to die because she had use for him.

It was good that someone did.

He wiped his eyes, leaned his head back against the chair and composed his face, mentally severing the nerves to it, drawing smaller and smaller breaths until he could be as statue‑calm as Banichi or Tabini.

“Are you hurting, nand’ paidhi? Do you need a doctor?”

Giri’s confusion was funny, so wildly, hysterically funny, it all but shattered him. He laughed once, a strangled sound, and got control of it, and wiped his eyes a second time.

“No,” he said, before Giri could escape in alarm. “ No , dammit, I don’t need a doctor. I’m all right. I’m just tired.” He shut his eyes against further ministrations, felt the leak of tears and didn’t open his eyelids, just kept his breathing calm, down a long, long, head‑splitting spiral of fire‑warmth and lack of oxygen, that bottomed out somewhere in a dizzy dark. He heard a confused set of voices talking in the background, probably discussing him. Hell, why not? he asked himself.

Usually it was the servants that betrayed you, the likes of Djinana and Maigi, Tano and Algini. But in the flutter of banners, the clashing of weapons, the smoke of shattered buildings, the rules of all existence changed. Hell broke loose. Or maybe it was television. Machimi and shadows.

Blood on the terrace, Jago had said, coming back out of the rain, and Banichi’s face had turned up in the mirror.

The beast walked Malguri’s halls after midnight, when everyone was asleep… looking for its head, and damned upset about it.

It’s my gun, Banichi had said, and it was. He’d been used, Banichi had been used, Jago had been used–everyone had been used, in every way. It was all machimi, and ordinary atevi didn’t know the game either–ordinary atevi had never understood the feud between the humans who’d had to stay on the station and those who’d taken the ship and gone, for two hundred cursed, earthbound years…

They’d fallen through a hole in space and found not a single star they knew, in the spectra of a thousand suns that fluttered on atevi banners, banners declaring war, declaring ownership of the world that seemed, for stranded strangers, the surest chance to live in freedom.

He lay still in the chair, listening to the snap of the fire, letting the tides of headache come and go–exhausted emotionally and physically–aching in a dozen places, now that he was warm, but hurting less than he did when he moved.

Build the station for a base and go and search for resources at the next likely star, that was what the Pilots’ Guild had decided they would do. The hell with the non‑crew technicians and construction workers. Every kid on Mospheira knew the story. Every kid knew how Phoenix had betrayed them, and why Phoenix wasn’t a factor in their lives any longer. Time ran long between the stars and age didn’t pass the way it ought to–like in the stories, the man that slept a hundred years and never knew.

An atevi story or human, he wasn’t personally sure.

Goseniin and eggs. They daren’t kill the paidhi. Otherwise, how could they find out anything they needed to know?

“Bren‑ji.”

He flashed on the cellar, and the shadows around him, and the cold metal against his head. No. A less definite touch than that, brushing his cheek.

“Bren‑ji.”

A second touch. He blinked at a black, yellow‑eyed face, a warm and worried face.

“Jago!”

“Bren‑ji, Bren‑ji, you have to leave this province. Some people have come into Maidingi, following rumors–the same who’ve acted against you. We need to get you out of here, now–for your protection, and theirs. Far too many innocents, Bren‑ji. We’ve received advisement from the aiji‑dowager, from her people inside the rebel movement… certain of them will take her orders. Certain of that group she knows will not. The aijiin of two provinces are in rebellion–they’ve sent forces to come up the road and take you from Malguri.” The back of her fingers brushed his cheek a third time, her yellow eyes held him paralyzed. “We’ll hold them by what tactics we can use. Rely on Ilisidi. We’ll join you if we can.”

“Jago?”

“I’ve got to go. Got to go, Bren‑ji.”

He tried to delay her to ask where Banichi was or what they meant by hold them –but her fingers slipped through his, and Jago was away and out the door, her black braid swinging.

Alarm brought him to his feet–sore joints, headache, and lapful of blankets and all–with half that Jago had said ringing and rattling around a dazed and exhausted brain.

Hold them ? Hold a mob off from Malguri? How in hell, Jago?

And for what? One damned more illusion , Jago? Is this one real?

Innocents, Jago said.

People who wanted to kill him? Innocents?

People who were just scared, because the word had begun to spread of what had arrived in their skies. Malguri was still candle‑lit and fire‑lit. The countryside around about had had no lights. People in cities didn’t spend their time on rooftops looking at a station you couldn’t see in city haze without a telescope, no, but a quarter of Maidingi township had been in blackout, and ordinary atevi could have had pointed out to them what astronomers and amateurs would have seen in their telescopes days ago,

Now the panic began, the fear of landings, the rumor of attack on their planet from an enemy above their reach.

What were they to think of this apparition, absent a communication from the paidhi’s office, but a resumption of the War, another invasion, another, harsher imposition of human ways on the world? They’d had their experience of humans seeking a foothold in their territory.

He stood lost in the middle of a nightmare–realized Ilisidi’s guards were watching him anxiously, and didn’t know what to do, except that the paidhi was the only voice, the only voice that could represent atevi interests to Mospheira’s authorities–and to that ship up there.

No contact, the Guild had argued; but that principle had fallen in the first stiff challenge. To get the deal they wanted out of the station… to go on getting the means to search for Earth, they’d given in and allowed the initial personnel and equipment drops.

And two hundred years now from the War of the Landing, what did any human on earth know… but this world, and a way of life they’d gotten used to, and neighbors they’d reached at least a hope of understanding at distance?

Damn, he thought, angry, outraged at the intrusion over their heads, and he didn’t imagine that there was overmuch joy in Mospheira’s conversations with the ship, either.

Charges and counter‑charges. Charges his office could answer with some authority–but when Phoenix asked, Where is this interpreter, where is the paidhi‑aiji, what opinion does he hold and why can’t we find him?… what could Mospheira say? Sorry–we don’t know?

Sorry, we’ve never lost track of him before?

And couldn’t the Commission office, knowing what they knew, realize that, with that ship appearing in the skies, they’d better call his office in Shejidan? Or realize, if their call didn’t go through, that he was in trouble, that atevi knew what was going on, and that he might be undergoing interrogation somewhere?

Damned right, Hanks knew. Deana Nuke‑the‑Opposition Hanks was making decisions in his name on Mospheira, because he was out of touch.

He needed a phone, a radio, anything. “I have to talk to my own security,” he said, “about that ship up there. Please, nadiin, can you send someone to bring Jago back, or Banichi… any one of my staff? I’ll talk to Cenedi. Or the dowager.”

“I fear not, nand’ paidhi. Things are moving very quickly now. Someone’s gone for your coat and for heavier clothes. If you’d care for breakfast…”

“My coat. Where are we going, nadiin? When are we going? I need to get to a phone or a radio. I need to reach my office. It’s extremely important they know that I’m all right. Someone could take very stupid, very dangerous actions, nadiin!”

“We can present your request to Cenedi,” Giri said. “In the meantime, the water’s already hot, nand’ paidhi. Tea can be ready in a very small moment. Breakfast is waiting. We would very much advise you to have breakfast now. Please, nand’ paidhi. I’ll personally take your request to Cenedi.”

He couldn’t get more than that. The chill was back, a sudden attack of cold and weakness that told him Giri was giving him good advice. He’d gone to see Cenedi last night before supper. His stomach was hollow to the backbone.

And if they’d kept breakfast waiting and water hot since his meeting with Ilisidi, it wasn’t that they meant to take the usual gracious forever about bringing it.

“All right,” he said. “Breakfast. But tell the dowager!”

Giri disappeared. The other guard stood where he’d been standing, and Bren strayed back to the fireside, with his hair inching loose again, falling about his shoulders. His clothes were smudged with dust from the cellars. His shirt was torn about the front, somewhere in the exchange–most likely in his escape attempt, he thought. It wasn’t humanity’s finest hour. Atevi around him, no matter the sleep they’d missed, too, looked impervious to dirt and exhaustion, impeccably braided, absolutely ramrod straight in their bearing. He lifted sore arms, both of them, this time, wincing with the effort, and separating his tangled hair, braided three or four turns to keep it out of his face–God knew what had happened to the clip. He’d probably lost it on the stairs outside. If they went out that way he might find it.

A servant carried in a heavy tray with a breakfast of fish, cheese, and stone‑ground bread, along with a demi‑pot of strong black tea, and set it on a small side table for him. He sat down to it with better appetite than he’d thought he could possibly find, in the savory smell and the recollection of Giri’s warning that meals might not be on schedule again… which, with the business about getting his coat, meant they were going to take action to get him out, maybe through the opposition down in Maidingi… on Ilisidi’s authority, it might be.

But breaking through a determined mob was a scary prospect. Trust an atevi lord to know how far he or she could push… atevi had that down to an art form.

Still, a mob under agitation might not respect the aiji‑dowager. He gathered that Ilisidi had been with them and changed her mind last night; and if she tried to lie or threaten her way through a mob who might be perfectly content with assassinating the paidhi, there could well be shooting. A large enough mob could stop the van.

In which case the last night could turn out to be only a taste of what humanity’s radical opposition might do to him if it got its hands on him. If things got out of hand, and they couldn’t get to a plane–he could end up shot dead before today ended, himself, Ilisidi, God knew who else… and that could be a lot better than the alternative.

He ate his breakfast, drank his tea, and argued with himself that Cenedi knew what he was doing, at least. A man in Cenedi’s business didn’t get that many gray hairs or command the security of someone of Ilisidi’s rank without a certain finesse, and without a good sense of what he could get away with–legally and otherwise.

But he wanted Banichi and Jago, dammit, and if some political decision or Cenedi’s position with Ilisidi had meant Banichi and Jago had drawn the nasty end of the plan–

If he lost them…

“Nand’ paidhi.”

He turned about in the chair, surprised and heartened by a familiar voice, Djinana had come with his coat and what looked like a change of clothes, his personal kit and , thank God, his computer–whether Djinana had thought of it, whether Banichi or Jago had told him, or whoever had thought of it, it wasn’t going to lie there with everything it held for atevi to find and interpret out of context, and he wasn’t going to have to ask for it and plead for it back from Cenedi’s possession.

“Djinana‑ji,” he said, with the appalled realization that if he was leaving and getting to safety this morning, Malguri’s staff wouldn’t have that option, not the servants whose man’chi belonged to Malguri itself. “They’re saying people down in Maidingi are coming up here looking for me. That two aijiin are supporting an attack on Malguri. You surely won’t try to deal with this yourselves, nadi. Capable as you may be–”

Djinana laid his load on the table. “The staff has no intention of surrendering Malguri to any ill‑advised rabble.” Djinana whisked out a comb and brush from his kit, and came to his chair. “Forgive me, nand’ paidhi, please continue your breakfast–but they’re in some little hurry, and I can fix this.”

“You’re worth more than stones, Djinana!”

“Please.” Djinana pushed him about in the chair, pushed his head forward and brushed with a vengeance, then braided a neat, quick braid, while he ate a piece of bread gone too dry in his mouth and washed it down with bitter tea,

“Nadi‑ji, did you know why they brought me here? Did you know about the ship? Do you understand, it’s not an attack, it’s not aimed at you.”

“I knew. I knew they suspected that you had the answer to it.–And I knew very soon that you would never be our enemy, paidhi‑ji.” Djinana had a clip from somewhere–the man was never at a loss. Djinana finished the braid, brushed off his shoulders, and went and took up his coat. “There’s no time to change clothes, I fear, and best you wait until you’re on the plane. I’ve packed warm clothing for a change this evening.”

He got up from the chair, turned his back to Djinana, and toward the window. “Are they sending a van up?”

“No, paidhi‑ji. A number of people are on their way up here now, I hear, on buses. I truly don’t think they’re the ones to fear. But you’re in very good hands. Do as they say.” Djinana shoved him about by the shoulder, helped him on with the coat, and straightened his braid over the collar. “There. You look the gentleman, nadi. Perhaps you’ll come back to Malguri. Tell the aiji the staff demands it.”

“Djinana,–” One couldn’t even say I like . “I’ll certainly tell him that. Please, thank everyone in my name.” He went so far as to touch Djinana’s arm. “Please see that you’re here when I come visiting, or I’ll be greatly distressed.”

That seemed to please Djinana, who nodded and quietly took his leave past a disturbance in the next room–Ilisidi’s voice, insisting, “They won’t lay a hand on me!”

And Cenedi’s, likewise determined:

“ ’Sidi‑ji, we’re getting out , damned if they won’t come inside! Shut up and get your coat!”

“Cenedi, it’s quite enough to remove him out of range…”

“Giri, get ’Sidi’s coat! Now !”

The guards’ eyes had shifted in that direction. Nothing of their stance had altered. He gathered up his change of clothes and wrapped it about his computer, waiting with that in his arms and his kit in his hand, listening as Cenedi gave orders for the locking of doors and the extinguishing of fires.

But Djinana’s voice, distantly, said that the staff would see to those matters, that they should go, quickly, please, and take the paidhi to safety.

He stood there, the center of everyone’s difficulty, the reason for the danger to Malguri. He felt that the absolute least he could do was put himself conveniently where they wanted him. He supposed that they would go out through the hall and down; he ventured as far as the door to the reception room, but Cenedi burst through that door headed in the opposite direction, bringing Ilisidi with him, on a clear course toward the rearmost of Ilisidi’s rooms, with a number of guards following.

“Where’s Banichi?” he tried to ask as they went through the bedroom, with the guards trailing him, but Cenedi was arguing with Ilisidi, hastening her on through the hallways at the back of the apartments, to a back stairs. A man he thought he recognized from last night stood at the landing, holding a weapon he didn’t know, shoving shells into the butt from a box on the post of the stairs.

That gun wasn’t supposed to exist. He had never seen that man on staff in Malguri. Banichi and Jago, and presumably Tano and Algini, with them, had gone somewhere he didn’t know, a mob wanted to turn him over to rebels against Tabini–and they were bound down to the back side of Malguri, down, he realized as Cenedi and Ilisidi opened the doors onto shadowed stone–to a stairway beside the stable, where the hisses and grumbling of mecheiti out in the courtyard told him how they were leaving Malguri, unless they were taking this route only to divert pursuit–

This is mad, he thought as they came out onto the landing overlooking the courtyard, seeing that the mecheiti were rigged out in all their gear, with, moreover, saddle packs and other accoutrements they’d never used on their morning rides.

This isn’t two hundred years ago. They’ve planes, they’ve guns like that one back on the stairs…

Something exploded, shaking the stones, a vibration that went straight to his knees and his gut. Someone wasn’t waiting for the mob in the buses.

“Come on !” Cenedi yelled up at them from the courtyard, and he hurried down the steps, with some of Cenedi’s men behind him, and the handlers trying to get the mecheiti sorted out.

It was a crazed plan. Reason told him it was beyond lunacy to take out across the country like this. There was the lake. They might have arranged a boat across to another province.

If the provinces across the lake weren’t the ones in rebellion,

A second explosion hammered at the stones. Itisidi looked back and up, and swore; but Cenedi grabbed her arm and hurried her along where handlers held Babs waiting.

He spotted Nokhada, darted, arms encumbered, among the towering, shifting bodies; and wondered how he was to load the saddle packs with his bundled clothes and the computer, but the handlers took his belongings from him.

“Careful!” he said, wincing as the handler almost dropped the computer, the weight of which he hadn’t anticipated. His computer went into one bag, the clothes and the kit went into the other, on the other side of Nokhada’s lean and lofty rump, Nokhada fidgeting and fighting the rein. The mecheiti this morning all had a glimmer of brass about the jaw, not blunt caps on the rooting‑tusks, but a sharp‑pointed fitting he’d seen only in machimi–brass to protect the tusks.

In war.

It was surreal. The fighting‑brass was, with Nokhada’s head‑butting tendencies, not a weapon he wanted to argue with or even stay on the ground with. He took the rein one handler gave him, couldn’t manage it with the sore arm, shifted hands and hit Nokhada with his fist, trying to make the creature drop a shoulder. Riders all around him were already up. Nokhada objected, fidgeted up again, and resisted a second order, circling him, wild‑eyed in all the surrounding haste and excitement. That was how things were going to go, he thought, unsure he could restrain the creature in an emergency–scared of its strength and that jaw as he hadn’t been since the first.

“Nadi,” a handler said, offering a hand, and atevi strength snared and held the rein.

He grabbed the mounting‑strap, relied on the unceremonious shove of the handlers, shoved his foot in the stirrup on the way up and landed, sore‑boned, and with a wrench of his sore shoulders, on the pad, with his heart pounding. He took a quick fistful of rein to bring Nokhada under control in the general confusion, as someone opened the outward gate.

Cold morning wind blasted through the court, stinging his face as all the mecheiti began to move. He looked distractedly for Babs and Ilisidi. He brought Nokhada another circle, and Nokhada found a fix on Babs before he even saw Ilisidi.

He couldn’t hold Nokhada, then, with Babs headed for the gate. Nokhada shouldered other mecheiti and struck a loping pace in Babs’ wake, into the teeth of an incoming gust that felt like a wall of ice.

The arch passed around him as a blur of shadow and stone. The vast gray of the lake was a momentary, giddy nothingness first in front of him and then at his right as Nokhada veered sharply along the edge and up the mountainside.

Follow Babs to hell, Nokhada would.

XII

« ^ »

I t was across the mountainside, and up and up the brushy slope, across the gully, the very course he’d bashed his lip taking, the first time he’d ridden after Ilisidi.

And ten or so of Ilisidi’s guard, when he snatched a glance back on the uphill, were right behind him… along with a half a dozen saddled but riderless mecheiti.

They’d turned out the whole stable to follow, leaving nothing for anyone to use catching them–he knew that trick from the machimi. He found himself in a machimi, war‑gear and armed riders and all of it. It only wanted the banners and the lances… no place for a human, he kept thinking. He didn’t know how to manage Nokhada if they had to break through a mob, he didn’t know whether he could even stay on if they took any harder obstacles.

And ride across a continent to reach Shejidan? Not damned likely.

Jago had said believe Ilisidi. Djinana had said believe Cenedi.

But they were headed to the north and west, cut off, by the sound of the explosions, from the airport–cut off from communications, from his own staff, from everything and everyone of any resource he knew, unless Tabini was sending forces into Maidingi province to get possession of the airport–which the rebels held.

Which meant the rebels could go by air–while they went at whatever pace mecheiti flesh and bone could sustain. The rebels could track them, harass them as they liked, on the ground and from the air.

Only hope they hadn’t planes rigged to let them shoot at targets. Damned right they could think of it–no damned biichi‑gi about it: Mospheira had designed atevi planes to make that modification as difficult as possible–they’d stuck to fixed‑wing and generally faster aircraft, but it couldn’t preclude some atevi with a reason putting his mind to it. Finesse, he’d heard it said in the machimi, didn’t apply in war–and war was what two rebel aijiin were trying to start here.

Push Tabini to the brink, break up the Western Association and reform it around some other leader–like Ilisidi?

And she, twice passed over by the hasdrawad, was double‑crossing the rebels?

Dared he believe that?

An explosion echoed off Malguri’s walls.

He risked a second glance back and saw a plume of smoke going up until the wind whipped it completely away over the western wall. That was inside , he thought with a rising sense of panic, and as he swung his head about, he saw the crest of the ridge ahead of them, looming up with its promise of safety from weapons‑fire that might come up at them from Malguri’s grounds.

And maybe their disappearance over that ridge would stop the attack on Malguri, if the staff could convince a mob and armed professionals they weren’t there–God help Djinana and Maighi, who had never asked to be fighters, who had strangers like that man with the gun standing on the stairway, people Ilisidi and Cenedi must have brought in… people who might not put Malguri’s historic walls at such a high premium.

Cold blurred his eyes. The shooting pains in his shoulders took on a steady rhythm in Nokhada’s lurching climb. There was one craggy knoll between them and sharpshooters that might be trying to set up outside Malguri’s mountain ward walls–but Banichi and Jago were seeing to that, he told himself so. Brush and rock came up in front of them, then blue sky. Perspective went crazy for a moment as first Ilisidi and Cenedi went over the edge and then Nokhada nosed down and plunged down the other side, a giddy, intoxicating flurry of strides down a landscape of rough rock and scrub that his subconscious painted snow‑white and sanity jerked into browns and earth again. Pain rode the jolts of Nokhada’s footfalls–torn joints, sore muscles, hands and legs losing feeling in the cold.

No damned place to take a fall. He suffered a moment of panic, then felt the mountain, God save his neck–Nokhada ran with the same logic and the same necessities as he knew, and he clenched the holding strap in his good hand and wrapped the rein into the fingers of the weaker one, beginning to take the wind in his face with an adrenaline rush, hyper‑awareness of the slope and where Nokhada’s feet had to touch, however briefly, to make the next stride.

He was plotting a course down the mountain, drunk on understanding, that was the crazed part, his eye saw the course and his heart was racing. His ears felt the shock an explosion made, but it was distant and he was hellbent for catching the riders ahead of him–not sane. Not responsible. Enjoying it. He’d damned near caught up to Ilisidi when Babs gave a whip of the tail and took a course that Nokhada nearly killed them both trying to reach.

“ ’ Sidi !” he heard Cenedi yell at their backs behind them.

He suffered a second of sane, cold panic, realizing that he’d maneuvered past Cenedi and Ilisidi knew he was at her tail.

A rock exploded near them, just blew up as it sat on the hillside. Babs took the slot beside a narrow waterfall and struck out uphill among stones the size of houses, higher and higher into the mountains.

Sniper, sanity said. They were still in range.

But he followed Ilisidi, slower now, more sheltered among the boulders, and he had time and breath to realize the foolishness he’d just committed, that he’d pushed himself next behind Ilisidi, that Cenedi was at his back, and that Nokhada was sensibly unwilling to slow down now and lose momentum on the uphill climb.

Fool, he thought. He’d lost his good sense on the mountain. Knowing the responsibility he carried, he’d risked his neck because he carried it, and because of the things he couldn’t do and didn’t have, and he didn’t care, didn’t damned well care, during those few selfish highspeed minutes that were nothing but now , risking his life, damn them all, damn Tabini, damn the atevi, damn his mother, Toby, Barb, and the whole human race.

He could have died. He could easily have died in that crazed course. And he discovered so much bitter, secret anger in him–so much rage he shook with it, while Nokhada’s saner, more reasoned strides carried him up and up among the protecting rocks. What sent him down a mountain wasn’t, then, the delirious freedom he told himself it was, it was what he’d just experienced: a spiteful, irrational death wish, aiming his own destruction at everyone and everything he served– that was what he was courting.

Not damned fair. The only thing in his life he enjoyed with complete abandon. And it was a damned death wish.

He hated the pressures at home on Mospheira, the job‑generated pressures and most of all the emotional, human ones. At the moment he hated atevi, at least in the abstract, he hated their passionless violence and the lies and the endless, schizophrenic analysis he had to do, among them, of every conclusion, every emotion, every feeling he owned, just to decide whether it came of human hardwiring or logical processing.

And most of all he hated hurting for people who didn’t hurt back. He didn’t trust his feelings any longer. He was drained, he was exhausted, he hurt, and he wasn’t dealing with either reality sanely anymore.

It was the second personal truth he’d faced–since that dark moment with the gun at his head. It told him that the paidhi wasn’t handling the job stress. That the paidhi was scared as hell and not sure of the people around him, and no longer sure he’d done the right thing in anything he’d done.

You didn’t know, you didn’t damned well know with atevi, what went on at gut level, on any given point, not because you couldn’t translate it, but because you couldn’t feel it, couldn’t resonate to it, couldn’t remotely guess what it felt like inside.

They were on the verge of war, atevi were shooting each other over what to do about humans, and the paidhi was coming apart–they’d taken too much away from him last night. Maybe they hadn’t meant to do it, maybe they didn’t know they’d done it, and he could reason with himself, he knew all the psychological labels: that there was too much unresolved, that there were even physiological reasons behind the sudden fit of chill and fear and the morbid self‑dissection this morning that had their only origins in the business last night.

And, no, they’d not been playing games last night. It had never been a false threat they’d posed; Cenedi was damned good at what he did, and Cenedi hadn’t weighed his mental condition heavily against the answers Cenedi had to have.

It didn’t change the fact they’d shaken things loose inside–ricochets that were still racketing about a psyche that hadn’t been all that steady to start with.

He couldn’t afford to break. Not now. Ignore the introspection and figure out the minimal things he was going to tell atevi and humans that would silence the guns and discredit the madmen who wanted this war.

That was what he had to do.

At least the gunshots had stopped coming. They’d passed out of earshot of the explosions, whatever might be happening back at Malguri, and struck a slower, saner pace on easier ground, where they might have run–a more level course, interspersed with sometimes a jolting climb, sometimes a jogging diagonal descent–generally much more to the south now, and only occasionally to the west, which seemed to add up to a slant toward Maidingi Airport, where the worst trouble was.

And maybe to a meeting with help from Tabini, if Tabini had any idea what was happening here… and trust Banichi that Tabini did know, in specifics, if Banichi could get to a phone, or if the radio could reach someone who could get the word across half a continent.

“We’re heading south,” he said to Cenedi, when they came close enough together. “Nadi, are we going to Maidingi?”

“We’ve a rendezvous point on the west road,” Cenedi said. “Just past a place called the Spires. We’ll pick up your staff there, assuming they make it.”

That was a relief. And a negation of some of his suspicions. “And from there?”

“West and north, to a man we think is safe. Watch out, nand’ paidhi!”

They’d run out of space. Cenedi’s mecheita, Tali, forged ahead, making Nokhada throw up her head and back‑step. Nokhada gave a snap at Tali’s departing rump, but there was no overtaking her in that narrow space between two room‑sized boulders.

Pick up his staff, Cenedi said. He was decidedly relieved on that score. The rest, avoiding the airport, getting to someone who might have motorized transport, sounded much more sane than he’d feared Cenedi was up to. Rather than a mapless void, their course began to lie toward points he could guess, toward provinces the other side of the mountains, westward, ultimately–he knew his geography. And firmer than borders could ever be among atevi, where individual towns and houses hazed from one man’chi to another, even on the same street–Cenedi knew a definite name, a specific man’chi Cenedi said was safe.

Cenedi, in his profession, wasn’t going to make that judgment on a guess. Ilisidi might be double‑crossing her associates–but aijiin hadn’t a man’chi to anyone higher, that was the nature of what they were: her associates knew it and knew they had to keep her satisfied.

Which they hadn’t, evidently. Tabini had made his play, a wide and even a desperate one, sending the paidhi to Malguri, and letting Ilisidi satisfy her curiosity, ask her questions–running the risk that Ilisidi might in fact deliver him to the opposition. Tabini had evidently been sure of something–perhaps (thinking as atevi and not as a human being) knowing that the rebels couldn’t satisfy Ilisidi, or meant to double‑cross her: never count that Ilisidi wouldn’t smell it in the wind. The woman was too sharp, too astute to be taken in by the number‑counters and the fear‑merchants… and if he was, personally, the overture Tabini made to her, Ilisidi might have found Tabini’s subtle hint that he foreknew her slippage toward the rebels quite disturbing; and found his tacit offer of peace more attractive at her age than a chancier deal with some ambitious cabal of provincial lords who meant to challenge a human power Tabini might deal with.

A deal with conspirators who might well, in the way of atevi lords, end up attacking each other.

He wasn’t in a position with Ilisidi or Cenedi to ask those critical questions. Things felt touchy as they were. He tried now to keep the company’s hierarchy of importance, always Babs first, Cenedi’s mecheita mostly second, and Nokhada politicking with Cenedi’s Tali for number two spot every time they took to a run, politics that hadn’t anything to do with the motives of their riders, but dangerous if their riders’ personal politics got into it, he had sopped that fact up from the machimi, and knew that he shouldn’t let Nokhada push into that dual association ahead of him, not with the fighting‑brass on the tusks. Cenedi wouldn’t thank him, Tali wouldn’t tolerate it, and he had enough to do with the bad arm, just to hold on to Nokhada.

He’d recovered from his insanity, at least by the measure he now had some idea where they were going.

But he daren’t push. He’d gotten Ilisidi’s help, but it was a chancy, conditional support for him and for Tabini that he still daren’t be sure of… never trust that the woman Tabini called ’Sidi‑ji wasn’t pursuing some course toward her own advantage, and toward her own power in the Western Association, if not in some other venue.

From one giddy moment to the next, he trusted none of them.

Fourteen words, the language had for betrayal, and one of them doubled for ‘taking the obvious course.’

XIII

« ^ »

I f Ilisidi was following any established trail at all, Bren couldn’t see it even when Nokhada was in Babs’ very tracks. He spotted Ilisidi high up among towering boulders, Babs moving like one of Malguri’s flitting ghosts past gaps in the rocks.

He didn’t see the crest of the hill–he only lost track of Ilisidi and Cenedi at the same moment, and, following them, at the head of their column of twenty‑odd riders, came out on a windy, boulder‑littered hillside above a shallow brook and a set of brush‑impeded wheel‑ruts.

The road? he asked himself.

Was that track the west road Cenedi had talked about, where they were to meet the rest of their party?

Other riders arrived at the crest of the hill behind him, and Cenedi sent a rider down to, as he heard Cenedi say, see whether they saw any recent tracks.

Machine‑tracks, that specific word implied.

A truck could possibly survive that road, given a good suspension and heavy tires.

And if service trucks were all the opposition had at their disposal, and they didn’t take a plane out of Maidingi Airport, God, Ilisidi could lead them back over the ridge mecheita‑back and outrun any pursuit afoot.

So their means of transport out of Malguri wasn’t crazy. This wasn’t Mospheira’s well‑developed back country. There wasn’t a phone line or a power line or a paved road or a rail track for days.

They sat up on their mountainside and waited, while the man Cenedi had sent rode down, had his look, and rode uphill again, with a hand signal that meant negative.

Bren let go a breath, and his heart sank in suppositions and suspicions too ready to leap up. He was ready to object that, considering the fight back at Malguri, they couldn’t hold Banichi to any tight schedule, and they shouldn’t go on without waiting.

But Cenedi said, before he had a chance to object, that they should get down and wait.

That bettered his opinion of Cenedi. He felt a hundredfold happier with present company and their priorities, in that light, whatever motivated them. He began to get down, the way Cenedi had said, attempted with kicks to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, but that wasn’t a proposition Nokhada seemed to favor. Nokhada ripped the rein forward with an easy toss of her head, sent pain knifing through his sprained shoulder and circled perversely on the slope until her head was uphill and he couldn’t get down over the increased height, in the condition his legs were in, damn the creature.

He kicked Nokhada. They made one more embarrassing and vainly contested three‑sixty on the hillside.

At which point one of the other riders took pity on him and got down to take Nokhada’s rein.

“Nand’ paidhi.” It was the same man, he realized by the voice, who’d beaten hell out of him in the restroom, who faced Nokhada sideways, with the dismount‑side to the upslope of the hill, then stood waiting to steady him as he slid down.

He wasn’t damned well ready to forgive anyone who’d helped in that charade last night.

But he wasn’t among enemies, either, that was the whole point of what Cenedi had been trying to determine; and the man hadn’t in point of fact beaten him unnecessarily, only dissuaded him from further contest.

So he gave up his quarrel and surrendered his grudge with a quiet, “Thank you, nadi,” and slid down and dropped.

He’d thought he could at least stand up. The knees went–he’d have been down the slope under Nokhada, except for Cenedi’s man keeping him upright, and sensation arrived in his lower body about the same moment his legs straightened.

He managed to take Nokhada’s rein into his own hand and, with a mumbled thanks for the rescue, to limp aside to a place to be alone and to sit down. It was a very odd pain, he thought–not quite bad, at one moment, blood getting back where it belonged, or flesh figuring out there was supposed to be more of it over certain previously undiscovered bones in the human anatomy.

But he decided he didn’t want to sit down at the moment. His eyes watered in the chill wind, and he wiped them, using the arm he hadn’t just wrenched getting down. For a moment he was temporally lost–flashed on the cellar and on remembered anger and went dizzy and uncertain of time‑sense as he looked down the slope. He settled for shifting from one foot to the other as a way to rest, holding Nokhada’s rein while Nokhada lowered her head and rooted with metal‑capped tusks after a small woody shrub until it gave up its grip on the hillside. Nokhada manipulated it in her muscular upper lip and happily destroyed it.

Cold helped the pain. He just wanted to stand there mindlessly and watch Nokhada kill shrubs, but conscious thought kept creeping in–about the road down there, and the chance Banichi and Jago might not have made it away from Malguri.

The chance also that Ilisidi’s position wasn’t a simple or even a settled question. She was absolutely a wild card, dangerous to everyone with the Association trying, as it was, to fragment. It was only the fact that they were waiting for Banichi and waiting with a great deal of patience, for atevi, that persuaded him that he was in safe hands at all. Being atevi, Cenedi could return to his project of last night and peel another layer of truth out of him without a qualm if he needed to, at any moment, because, being atevi, Cenedi held his morality was Ilisidi’s welfare–consideration of which could shift any time the wind shifted.

How many people on Mospheira, nand’ paidhi?

He earnestly wished he had the gun from his bedroom–but that hadn’t been in the kit Djinana gave him, he’d felt the weight of it, and he didn’t know where it had ultimately gone.

Back to Banichi, he hoped, before it turned up in evidence in some court case Tabini‑aiji couldn’t prevent.

A scatter of pebbles came down the slope–a riderless mecheita was rooting after something up above. Nokhada hardly twitched an ear, busy chewing.

Then every mecheita’s ears came up, and the heads came up, the whole lot of them looking toward the bottom of the hill, where the curve of the slope hid the farther end of the road.

Men all around him ducked into cover behind the rocks. Cenedi arrived in two fast strides, jerked him away from Nokhada and jerked him down with him behind the shelter of a targe lump of stone.

He heard an engine then, in all that silence. At the first intimation of danger, the riderless mecheiti had tended together with Babs, and Ilisidi kept hold of Babs–holding the whole pack together on the slope above them.

The engine grew louder, nearer.

Cenedi signaled a query from another man with a hand motion to stay down.

Something rattled and popped and echoed, over the hills.

What was that? Bren wondered for half a heartbeat.

Then he heard the thump of an explosion. Muscles jerked, and his heart began to beat heavily in fright as Cenedi retreated from the post he had and moved rapidly from cover to cover, directing the company back uphill to the mecheiti.

They were leaving–pulling out. That rattle was gunfire; he knew it when that sound repeated itself. An exchange of fire. Cenedi had signaled him first of all. He felt a tremor in his legs he put down to sheer terror. He read Cenedi’s signal in retrospect, but he kept hoping for Banichi and Jago to appear from around the hill.

They couldn’t leave now, so close–if people were shooting, they were shooting at enemies, and that meant Banichi and Jago were there , just beyond the hill, that close to them…

A veil of black smoke rolled along the road below, carried on a stiff wind. In it, from the edge of the hill, he saw someone running, a single black‑uniformed figure–

Not an attack, only a single atevi headed around the rocks and then uphill toward them at a desperate, stumbling run–a lighter someone than the average atevi man.

Jago, he realized in a heartbeat; and sprang up and ran, loosing small landslides of gravel, slipping and sliding and losing skin on his hands. He met her halfway to the bottom, dusty, gasping for breath as she caught herself against a boulder.

“Ambush,” she breathed, “at the Spires. Get up there! Tell Cenedi go, get clear! Now!”

“Where’s Banichi?”

“ Go , dammit! The tank’s blown, it’s afire, he can’t walk, he’ll hold them till you get a start–”

“Hell! What, hold them? Is he coming ?”

“He can’t, dammit. Bren‑ji,–”

He didn’t listen to atevi logic. He lit out running, down to the brush‑choked road, down into the smoke. He heard Jago running behind him, swearing at him and telling him he was a fool, get back, don’t risk himself.

Then he heard riders following. He skidded in the pebbles on the last of the slope and ran, catching at a boulder to make the sudden turn onto the road, into the smoke, afraid of the mecheiti running him down, afraid most of all of Cenedi catching him, forcing a retreat and leaving Banichi behind for no damn reason.

He felt heat in the smoke, saw a hot red center in the black, rolling cloud that turned into the burning skeleton of a truck with the doors open. The rattle of gunfire echoed off the surrounding hills, and amid that, he heard the sharp report of gunfire close at hand, from the area around the truck.

“Banichi!” he yelled, rubbing tears and soot, trying to make out detail through the stinging smoke. He saw something dark against the gray of the rocks, off the road, a black figure aiming a pistol up at the hills. Dirt kicked up around him, an explosion of gravel–a shot hitting the ground–and he ran for that figure, with the smoke for his only cover. Chips exploded off the rocks ahead of him. One stung his leg as he ducked behind the rocks where Banichi sheltered.

“You damned fool !” Banichi yelled at him as he arrived, but he didn’t care. He grabbed Banichi’s sleeve and his arm, trying to pull him up, onto his feet. Banichi was clearly in pain, catching at the rocks and waving him off as pieces exploded off the boulders around them.

They weren’t alone, then–Jago was beside him, grabbing Banichi on the other side, and, overwhelmed with help, Banichi gave up and cooperated with them, the three of them laboring across the ruts, while gunfire broke out loudly on their left, at ground level. Bullets shattered rock and thudded into the burning wreckage of the truck, the heat of the fire blasting breath away and slinging the skin as they crossed the road, using the smoke for cover.

More shots hit the truck. “That’s Cenedi!” Jago gasped. “He’s on the road!”

“Along the stream!” Banichi yelled, limping heavily, taking both of them downslope as, just past the truck, they slid down the bank of the stream, among boulders and knee‑deep into cold water, all in a haze of smoke.

Lungs burned. Eyes watered. Bren choked back coughs, hanging onto Banichi, trying to cope with the uneven ground and Banichi’s lurching steps, Jago’s height giving her more leverage on Banichi’s other side.

But they were out of the firing. Coughing and stumbling, they came beyond the area where the bullets were hitting. Banichi slipped to his knees on the stony bank, and, coughing, collapsed on the rocks, trying to get his gun back in its holster.

“Nadi, where are you hit?” Bren asked.

“Not hit,” Banichi said between coughing fits. “They were ready for us. At the Spires. Explosives.–Dammit, is that Cenedi’s lot?”

“Yes,” Jago said shortly, and tried to get Banichi up again. Banichi tried, on one knee. Whatever was wrong, his leg on Jago’s side couldn’t bear his weight, and Bren shoved with all his strength to help Banichi up the bank toward Cenedi’s position in the windborne haze of smoke.

Gunfire kicked up the dirt around them. Bren flung himself down with Banichi and Jago, flattened himself as much as he could among the humped rocks at the edge of the road, expecting a bullet to find his back as round after round kicked up the earth and ricochets went in random directions, chipping rock, disturbing the weeds.

Then a moment’s quiet. He started to get up, and to pull Banichi up with him, but a man came running out of the smoke, and immediately after, two mecheiti, riderless–one caught the man with its head and threw him completely into the air. He landed and the mecheiti were on him, ripping him with their bronze‑capped tusks, trampling him under them.

“Move!” Jago yelled, as Banichi flung himself up and forward, and Bren caught him as best he could on the right side. Banichi lost his footing on Jago’s side and cost them more effort to get him up. Mecheiti were coming at them, riderless shapes in the haze. Banichi was yelling something about his gun.

Then another mecheita was into it–Nokhada, ripping with her tusks, spinning and butting and slashing at retreating rumps–it was that fast, and Bren grabbed Banichi by the belt and tried to get him up and out of the road–but another mecheita darted in on Nokhada’s flank, raked Nokhada’s side with a glancing blow; and then, God, Babs was into it, riderless, laying about him at both combatants, forcing them apart, driving Nokhada off the road downslope, Tali off into the smoke, others scattering, as they struggled to get Banichi toward the rocks–the mecheiti had gone amok–and a barrage of fire came from somewhere in the smoke as they reached the boulders at the foot of the hill. Bren heard someone yelling orders to draw back, not to pursue, get the mecheiti.

Another voice shouted, “They’ll be up our backs, nadi!”

“They’ve already radioed!” Banichi yelled as loudly as he could, resting his arms against a boulder. “Dammit! Get out of here!”

“We were clear!” a man protested, Giri turning up at Bren’s elbow, catching at his arm. “Nand’ paidhi, what were you doing?”

“He lost his wits,” Jago said sharply. Giri brushed past Bren, took his place supporting Banichi on that side. Others of their company were arriving out of the smoke, still firing down the road, but nothing seemed to be coming back.

“They’re going to try to get behind us, or they’ve got a van farther back,” he heard Jago say to someone, on a gasped breath. “We’ve got to get out of here–they’ll have called our location in. We’ll have planes in here faster than we can think about it. Those are no amateurs.”

Men were running, sorting out the mecheiti. Bren spotted Nokhada in the milling about and ran and caught Nokhada’s trailing reins–Nokhada had a raking wound down her shoulder, and a bleeding puncture from a blow to the neck, and she resisted any signal to lower a shoulder for him, circling on the pivot of the rein and throwing her head. He tried again, holding on to the mounting‑straps with his sore arm, trying not to require anyone’s help.

Someone grabbed him by the right arm, spun him against Nokhada’s shoulder, and hit him in the side of the head–he didn’t even see it coming. He came to bruised and on the stony ground with Jago’s voice in his ear, arguing with someone.

“Tell me what he’s up to!” Cenedi’s voice, then. “Tell me where he thinks he’s going–when the shooting starts, a man takes his real direction–or do they say that in Shejidan?”

His eyes were blurred, his ear was ringing, and he put his hand on a sharp rock, trying to prop himself on the better arm. “He doesn’t know better,” Jago was saying. “I don’t know what he’ll do next, nadi! He’s not atevi! Isn’t that the point of all this?”

“Nadi,” Cenedi said coldly, “ inform him what he’ll do next. Next time I’ll shoot him in the knee and not discuss the matter. Take me very seriously.”

A towering shadow came between them and the sun. Babs, and Ilisidi, only watching, while Bren staggered to his feet.

“Aiji‑ma,” came Jago’s quiet voice from beside him, and Jago’s hard grip on his arm, pulling him aside. He stood there with the side of his face burning, with hearing dimmed in one ear, as Ilisidi drifted past and Cenedi stalked off from him. “Damned fool !” Jago said with a shake at his arm.

“They’d have left him!”

“Did you hear him?” Another shake at his arm. “He’ll cripple you. It’s not an idle threat!”

Two of Cenedi’s men had caught Nokhada, and brought her, shaking her head and fighting the restraint. He groped after the rein a man offered him, and made a shaken effort to get the stirrup turned to mount–one of them got Nokhada to drop the shoulder, and he got his toe in the stirrup, but he slipped as Nokhada came up, a thorough botch. He hung from the mounting‑straps with both feet off the ground, until someone shoved him from below and he landed far enough on to drag himself the rest of the way aboard.

He saw Jago getting onto another of the spares, the last two men mounting up, as Ilisidi started into motion and Nokhada started to move with the group. His vision grayed out on him in the sudden motion–had been graying out since Jago had lit into him, for reasons doubtless valid to her. His hands shook, and balance faltered.

“You stay on ,” Jago said, drawing near him. “You stay with the mecheita, do you hear me, nadi?”

He didn’t answer. It made him mad. He could understand Cenedi hitting him, he knew damned well what he’d done in going after Banichi. He’d violated Ilisidi’s chain of command–he’d forced them into a fight Cenedi would have avoided, because Cenedi was looking out for the dowager–and possibly, darker suspicion, because Cenedi would all along as soon leave Banichi and Jago in the lurch and have him completely to himself and the dowager’s politics. Cenedi personally would gladly sell him to the highest bidder, that was the gut‑level fear that had sent him down that hill, he thought now, that and the equally gut‑level human conviction that the treason he was committing was, humanly speaking, minor and excusable.

It wasn’t, for Cenedi. It wasn’t, for Jago, and that was what he couldn’t understand–or accept.

“Do you hear me, nadi, do you understand?”

“Where’s Algini and Tano?” he challenged her.

“On a boat,” Jago snapped, her knee bumping his, as the mecheiti moved next to each other. “Likewise providing your enemies a target, and a direction you could have gone. But we’ll be damned lucky now if–”

Jago stopped talking and looked skyward. And said a word he’d never heard from Jago.

He looked. His ears were still ringing. He couldn’t hear what she heard.

“Plane,” Jago said, “dammit!”

She reined back in the column as Ilisidi put Babs to a fast jog into the stream and across it, close to the mountain. Nokhada took a sudden notion to overtake the leaders, jostled others despite a hard pull on the rein.

He could hear the plane coming now. There wasn’t anything they could do but get to the most inconvenient angle for it that they could find against the hills, and that seemed to be their leaders’ immediate purpose. It wasn’t a casually passing aircraft. It sounded low, and terror began to increase his heartbeat. He wondered whether Ilisidi and Cenedi were doing the right thing, or whether they should let the mecheiti run free and get into the rocks. It wasn’t damned fair, being shot at without any weapon, any cover, any way to outrun it–it wasn’t anything like kabiu , it wasn’t the way atevi had waged war in the past– he was the object of contention, and it was human tech atevi were aiming at each other, human tactics…

They kept their course along the mountainside, Ilisidi and Cenedi holding a lead Nokhada wasn’t contesting now, the rest of the column behind, strung out along the streamside. Cenedi was worried. He saw Cenedi turn and look back and up at the sky.

The engine sound came clearer and clearer, illegal use, unapproved use, to fire from the air–they’d designed the stall limits to discourage it, considering that Mospheira was situated as it was, easily within reach of small aircraft. They’d kept the speed up, not transferred anything to do with targeting–no fuses, no bomb sights; it was the paidhi’s job to keep a thing like this from happening…

His mind was busy with that train of thought as the plane came down the stream‑cut roadway, low, straight at them. Its single engine echoed off the hills. The riders around him drew guns, a couple of them lifted hunting rifles–and he didn’t know to that moment whether atevi had figured out how to mount guns on aircraft, or whether it was only a reckless pilot spotting them and trying to scare them.

The plane’s skin was thin enough bullets might get to the pilot or hit something vital, like the fuel tanks. He didn’t know its design that intimately. It hadn’t been on his watch. Wilson’s, it had probably been Wilson’s tenure…

His heart thudded in panic. Their column had stopped entirely now and faced about to the attack. He held Nokhada on a short rein, while gunfire racketed around him, aimed aloft.

The plane roared over them, and explosions went off in midair, over their heads, making the mecheiti jump and all but bolt. Puffs of smoke lingered after the fireballs. Rocks rolled down the mountain, dislodging slides of gravel.

“Dropping explosives,” he heard someone say.

Bombs. Grenades. Above all, trust that atevi handled numbers. They wouldn’t make that many mistakes. “They haven’t got the timing down,” he said urgently to Banichi, who’d reined in near him. “It blew above us. They’ll figure it. They’ll reset those fuses. We can’t give them any more tries at us.”

“We haven’t got a choice,” Banichi said. Atevi didn’t sweat. Banichi was sweating. His face was a color he’d never seen an atevi achieve, as he methodically shoved in another clip, from the small number remaining on his belt.

The plane was coming around again, and their group moved as Babs started out at a fast pace, descending as the stream‑cut road descended. The mecheiti bunched up now, as close as the terrain allowed, trampling shrubs.

Changing the altitude, changing the targeting equation, Bren thought to himself–it was the best thing they could do, besides find cover the land didn’t offer them, while that atevi pilot was trying to work out the math of where his bombs had hit. Somebody behind him was yelling something about concentrating fire on the fusilage and the pilot, not the wings, the fuel tanks were closer in.

It was all crazed. He heard the roar of the engine and looked up as the plane came streaking down at them, this time from the side, over the mountain opposite them, and gave them only a brief window of fire.

Explosions pounded the hill above them and showered them with rock chunks and dirt–Nokhada jumped and threw her head at an enemy she couldn’t reach.

“Getting smart, the bastard,” someone said, and Ilisidi, in the lead, led them quickly around the shoulder of the hill, off the road now, while they could hear the plane coming back again.

Then came a distant rumble out of the south, the sound of thunder. Weather moving in.

Please God, Bren thought. Clouds and cover. He’d nerved himself for the bombs. The prospect of rescue had, his hands trembling and the sweat breaking out under his arms.

Another pass. A bomb hit behind them and set brush burning.

A second plane roared over immediately behind that, and dropped its bombs the other side of the hill,

“There’s two of them,” Giri cried. “Damn!”

“That one’s still figuring it out,” Banichi said. The number one plane was coming back again. They were caught on an open hillside, and Banichi and Jago and Cenedi and the rest of them drew calm aim, tracked it as it came–Cenedi said, at the last moment, “Behind the cowling.”

They opened up, gunfire echoing off the other hill.

The plane roared over and didn’t drop its bombs. It ripped just above the crest of the hill and a second later a loud explosion shook the ground.

Nobody cheered. The second plane was coming in fast and they were on the move again, picking their way over the rocks, traveling as fast as they could. Thunder boomed again. One assumed it was thunder. The second plane came over again and dropped its bombs too soon. They hit the hill crest.

They descended the steep way, then, into a narrow ravine, a smaller window for the plane at its speed than it was for them. They heard a plane coming. Its engine was sputtering as thunder–it had to be thunder–rolled and rumbled in the distance.

That plane’s crippled, Bren thought. Something’s wrong with it. God, there’s hope.

He didn’t think it would drop its bombs. He watched it make its pass in the narrow sky above them.

Then an explosion went off right over them, and Nokhada jumped. A sharp impact hit his shoulder, and the rider next to him went down–he didn’t see why–brush came at his face and he put up a hand to protect himself as Nokhada ran him up the hill and stopped close to Babs.

He was half‑deaf from the blast, but not so he couldn’t hear mecheiti screaming in fright or pain. He looked back, saw riders down where he’d been, and tried to turn back. Nokhada had other ideas and fought him on the slope, until other riders went back.

But Banichi was still in sight; he saw Jago among those afoot, heard a single gunshot. The screaming stopped abruptly, leaving the silence and the ringing of his ears; then, after a moment of milling about, and another of Nokhada’s unwilling turn‑abouts on the slope, he saw people mounting up again, the column reorganizing itself.

A rider came forward in the line, and reported to Cenedi and Ilisidi three men dead, and one of the names was Giri.

He felt–he didn’t know what, then. An impact to the gut. The loss of someone he knew, a known quantity when so much was changing around him–he felt it personally; but he was glad at the same time it wasn’t Banichi or Jago, and he supposed in a vague, dazed way, that his sense of loss was a selfish judgement, on selfish human standards that had nothing to do with man’chi , or what atevi felt or didn’t feel.

He didn’t know right and wrong any longer. His head ached. His ears were still ringing and there was a stink of smoke and gunpowder in every breath he drew. Dirt had spattered him and Nokhada, even this far up the column, dirt and bits of leaves–he wasn’t sure what else had, and he didn’t want to know. He only kept remembering the shock of the bomb bursting, a wall of air and fragments that made itself one with the explosions on the road–recalled the shock of something hitting his arm with an impact that still ached. It was a fluke, that single accurate bomb. It might not happen again.

Or it might on the next such strike–he didn’t know how much farther they had to ride or how long their enemies could keep putting up planes from Maidingi Airport and hitting at them over and over again, with nothing, nothing they could do about it.

But the second plane didn’t come back, whether it had crashed in the mountains or made it back to the airport, and in the meantime the rumbling of thunder grew louder.

In a while more, clouds swept in, bringing cold air, first, then a spatter of rain, a crack of thunder. The riders around him delved into packs without getting down, pulled out black plastic rain‑cloaks and began to settle them on as the drops began to fall. He hoped for the same in his gear, and discovered it in the pack beside his knee, someone’s providence in this season of cold mountain rains. He sorted it out in the early moments of the rain, settled it over his head and over as much of him and the riding‑pad as he could, latching it up about his throat as the chill deluge began, blinding him with its gusts and trickling down his neck.

The plastic kept body heat in, his and Nokhada’s, the turbulence and the cloud cover up above the hills was a shield from aircraft, and if he froze where the stiff gusts plastered the plastic against his body or whipped up the edges of it on a shirt and coat beginning to be soaked from the trickle down his neck, any discomfort the storm brought on them was better than being hammered from the air.

For the most part he trusted Nokhada to follow Babs, tucked his hands under his arms and asked himself where Ilisidi’s strength possibly came from, because the more he let himself relax, the more his own was giving way, and the more the shivers did get through. Thin bodies chill faster, Giri had said that, he was sure it had been Giri, who was dead, now, spattered all over a hillside.

His brain kept re‑hearing the explosions.

Kept falling into black patches, when he shut his eyes, kept being back in that cellar, listening to the thunder, feeling a gun against his head and knowing Cenedi would do it again and for real, because Cenedi’s anger with humans was tied up with Ilisidi’s ambition and what had and hadn’t been possible for atevi to achieve even before that ship appeared in the skies, he read that much. Cenedi’s man’chi was with Ilisidi, the rebels offered Ilisidi association with them, Ilisidi had told Cenedi find out what the paidhi was, and in Cenedi’s eyes, it was his fault he’d convinced her not to take that rebel offer.

Hence Cenedi’s anger–at him, at Ilisidi’s surrendering her fight for the seat in Shejidan–to age, to time, to God knew what motive. The paidhi had no confidence he could interpret anything, not even himself, lately. He’d become a commodity for trade among atevi factions. He didn’t even know who owned him at the moment–didn’t know why Cenedi had waited on the hill for Banichi.

Didn’t know why Jago had been angry at him, for going after Banichi.

Jago… make a deal with Cenedi? Betray Tabini and Banichi? He didn’t think so.

He refused to think so, for no logical reason, only a human one–which didn’t at all apply to her. He knew that, if he knew nothing else, in the confusion of his thoughts. But he didn’t change his opinion.

Hill after hill after hill in the blinding rain.

Then another deeply cut ravine, where a tall growth of ironheart sheltered them from the blasts, and the thready leaves streamed and clumped with water, dumping it, when they chanced to brush against them, in small, icy floods that found their way down necks, more often than not.

But that cover of brush was the first relief from the wind they’d found, and Ilisidi called a rest and bunched them up, the twelve of them–only twelve surviving riders, he was dismayed to realize, and six mecheid on their own, trailing them through brush and along the stony hillsides. He hadn’t realized the losses, he hadn’t counted… he didn’t know where they might have lost the others, or whether, at some silent signal he’d missed, the party had divided itself.

He held on to the mounting‑straps and slid down Nokhada’s wet side, not sure he could get up again unaided, but glad enough to rest. For the first moment he had to stand holding to Nokhada’s harness just to keep his feet, his legs were so rubbery from riding. Lightning flickered and the thunder muttered over their heads. He could scarcely walk on the rain‑slick hillside without grabbing onto branches and leaning on one rock and the next. He wandered like a drunken man along the steep slope, seeking a warm spot and a place a little more out of the wind. He saw that Banichi had gotten down–and he worked his way in that direction, where four other men had gathered, with Jago, one of them squatting down beside her and holding Banichi’s ankle. The water‑soaked boot was stretched painfully tight over the joint.

“Is it broken, Jago‑ji?” he asked, getting down beside her.

“Probably,” she said darkly, not looking at him. By the stablehands’ foresight, she and Banichi both had rain‑cloaks, and she huddled in hers, not looking at him, not speaking, not willing to speak; he read that in the shoulder she kept toward him. But it was no place to argue with her, when Banichi was in pain, and everything seemed short‑fused.

The man who was dealing with Banichi at least seemed sure of what he was doing–might even be a real medic, Bren thought. Tabini had one in his guard. It made sense the aiji‑dowager might take such a precaution, considering her breakneck rides and considering the politics she had a finger in.

“The boot stays on ,” Banichi said, to a suggestion they cut it off. “It’s holding it together. I can at least–”

At which the man made a tentative probe that sent Banichi’s head back and his breath hissing through his teeth.

“Sorry,” the man said, and spoke to another of the guards kneeling by him. “Cut me a couple or three splints.”

One more of their company walked up to watch, steps whispering over sodden leaves, disturbing the occasional rock. Jago squatted, blowing on her clasped hands to warm them. Banichi wasn’t enjoying being the center of attention. He ebbed backward onto the ground and lay there staring up into the drizzle, ignoring all of it. The ground chill had to come through the plastic rain‑cloak. But the staff’s providence hadn’t extended to blankets, or to tents.

Ilisidi limped over, using her cane, and Cenedi’s arm, on the uneven ground. There ensued another discussion between Ilisidi and the perhaps‑medic as to whether Banichi’s ankle was broken; and Banichi, propping himself glumly on his elbows, entered the argument to say it had gone numb when the truck blew up and he’d finished the job when he’d jumped out under fire and hit a rock.

Which was more detail of what had happened in the ambush than he’d yet heard from Banichi.

“Can you walk on it?” Cenedi asked.

“In an emergency,” Banichi said, which proved nothing at all about how bad it was. It was broken, Bren thought. The ankle didn’t rest straight. “Not what I’d choose, nadi. What walking did you have in mind?”

“Outside Maidingi Airport, which seems unavailable, there are two, remotely three ways we can go from here.” Thunder rumbled, and Cenedi waited for it, while the rain fell steadily. “We’d confirmed Wigairiin as reliable, with its airstrip–hence the feints we asked for lakeward and southwest. But our schedule is blown to hell now. The rebels in Maidingi township have no doubt now that our answer to their association is no and that we’re going west. They can’t be so stupid as to forget our association with Wigairiin.”

“North of here,” Banichi said.

“North and west. On the edge of the hills. The rebels are bound to move to take Wigairiin’s airstrip–or to take it out.”

“Foolish to strike at Wigairiin,” Ilisidi said, “until they’re sure both Malguri and Wigairiin aren’t going with them. And they won’t have known that until we went out the stable gate.”

“Not an easy field to take from the air,” Cenedi said. “Expensive to take.”

“Unless they moved in forces overland, in advance of Malguri’s refusal,” Banichi said.

“Possible,” Cenedi said. “But let me tell you our other choices. There’s the border. Fagioni province, just at the foot of Wigairiin height. But it could be a soft border. Damned soft in a matter of hours if Wigairiin falls, and we’re left with the same guess where the border into loyal territory firms up after that if Wigairiin falls. There’s also the open country, if we ignore both Wigairiin and Fagioni township and head into the reserve there. That’s three hundred miles of wilderness, plenty of game. But no cover.”

“More air attacks,” Ilisidi said.

“We might as well resign the fight if we take that route.” Banichi shifted higher, to sit up, winced, and settled on an elbow. “Railhead at Fagioni. They’ll have infiltrated, if they’ve got any sense. Major force is already launched. Rainstorm won’t have stopped the trains. They know we didn’t take the lake crossing. They know the politics on this side. You were the only question, nand’ dowager.”

“So it’s Wigairiin,” Cenedi said.

“There’s south,” Banichi said. “Maidingi.”

“With twelve of us? They’d hunt us out in an hour. We’ve got this storm until dark, if the weather reports hold. That long we’ve got cover. We can make Wigairiin. We can get out of there.”

“In what ?” Banichi asked. “Forgive me. A plane that’s a low‑flying target?”

“A jet,” Cenedi said.

Banichi frowned and drew in a slow breath, seeming to think about it then. “But what is it,” Banichi asked, “since they took Maidingi? Four, five hours? Tabini has commercial aircraft at his disposal. He might be in Maidingi by now. He could have landed a force at the airport.”

“And the whole rebellion could be over,” Ilisidi said, “but I wouldn’t bet our lives on it, nadiin. The Association is hanging together by a thread of public confidence in Tabini’s priorities. To answer a rising against him with brutal force instead of negotiation, while the axe hangs over atevi heads, visibly? No. Tabini’s made his move, in sending Bren‑paidhi to me . If that plane goes out of Wigairiin, if I personally, with my known opposition to the Treaty, deliver the paidhi back to him–the wind is out of their sails, then and there. This is a political war, nadiin.”

“Explosives falling on our heads, nand’ dowager, were not a sudden inspiration. They were made in advance. The preparation to drop them from aircraft was made in advance. Surely they informed you the extent of their preparations.”

“Surely my grandson informed you,” Ilisidi said, “nadi, the extent of his own.”

What are we suddenly talking about? Bren asked himself. What are they asking each other?

About betrayal?

“As happens,” Banichi said, “he informed us very little. In case you should ask.”

My God.

“We go to Wigairiin,” Cenedi said. “I refuse, with ’Sidi’s life, to bet on Maidingi, or what Tabini may or may not have done.”

“I have to leave it to you,” Banichi said with a grimace and a shift on the elbow. “You know this area. You know your people.”

“No question, then,” Ilisidi said, and punctuated it with a stab of her walking‑stick at the sodden ground. “Tonight. If this rain keeps up–it’s not an easy airfield in turbulence, Cenedi assures me. Not at all easy when they’re shooting at you from the ground. If we get there we can hold the airstrip with two rifles, take the rest of the night off, and radio my lazy grandson to come get us.”

“I’ve flown in there,” Cenedi said. “Myself. It’s a narrow field, short, single runway, takeoffs and landings right out over a cliff, past a steep rock where snipers can sit. The house is a seventeenth‑century villa, with a gravel road down to Fagioni. The previous aiji was too aristocratic to fly over to Maidingi to catch the scheduled flights. She had the airstrip built, knocked down a fourteenth century defense wall to do it.”

“Hell of a howl from the Preservation Commission,” Ilisidi said. “Her son maintains the jet and uses it. It seats ten. It can easily handle our twelve, Cenedi’s rated for it, and it’s going to be fueled.”

“If,” Cenedi said, “if the rebels haven’t gotten somebody in there. Or sent them down, as you say, into Fagioni, to come up overland. If we have to scramble to take that field, nadiin, will you be with us? That’s the walk that could be necessary.”

“No question,” Banichi said glumly. “I’m with you.”

“None,” said Jago.

“The paidhi will take orders,” Cenedi said.

“I,” Bren started to answer, but Jago hit his knee with the back of her hand. “The paidhi,” she said coldly, “will do what he’s told. Absolutely what he’s told.”

“I–” He began to object on his own behalf, that he understood that, but Jago said, “Shut the hell up, nadi.”

He shut up. Jago embarrassed him. The anger and tension between Banichi and Cenedi was palpable. He looked at the rain‑soaked ground and watched the raindrops settle on last year’s fallen leaves and the scattered stones, while they discussed the geography of Wigairiin, and the airstrip, and the aiji of Wigairiin’s ties to Ilisidi. Meanwhile the putative medic had brought his splints, three straight sticks, and elastic bandage, and proceeded to wrap Banichi’s ankle–‘Tightly, nadi,“ Banichi interrupted the strategy session to say, and the medic said shortly he should deal with what he knew about.

Banichi frowned and leaned back, then, because it seemed to hurt, and was out of the discussion, while Jago asked pointed questions about the lay of the land.

There was an ancient wall on the south that cut off the approach to Wigairiin, with a historic and functional iron gate; but they didn’t expect it to be shut against them. Just before that approach, they were going to send the mecheiti with one man, around the wall, north and east, to get them home to Malguri.

Why not stable them at Wigairiin? Bren asked himself. Why not at least have them for a resource for escape if things went wrong there, and they had to get away?

For a woman who seemed to know a lot about assaulting fortresses, and a lot about airstrips and strategy–removing that resource as a fall‑back seemed a stupid idea. Cenedi letting her order it seemed more stupid than that, and Banichi and Jago not objecting to it–he didn’t understand. He almost said something himself, but Jago had said shut up, and he didn’t understand what was going on in the company.

Best ask later, he thought.

The dowager valued Babs probably more than she did any of them. That part was even understandable to him. She was old. If anything happened to Babs, he thought Ilisidi might lose something totally irreplaceable in her life.

Which was a human thing to think. In point of any fact when he was dealing with atevi feelings, he didn’t know what Ilisidi felt about a mecheiti she’d attacked a man for damaging. Forgetting that for two seconds was a trap, a disturbing, human miscalculation, right at the center of a transaction that was ringing alarm bells up and down his spine, and he couldn’t make up his mind what was going on with the signals he was getting from Banichi and Jago. God, what was going on?

But he couldn’t put it together without understanding what Ilisidi’s motive was, what she valued most, what she was logical about and what she wouldn’t be.

On such exaggerated threads his mind was running, chasing down invalid chains of logic, stretching connections between points that weren’t connected, trying to remember what specific and mutable points had persuaded him to believe what he believed was true–the hints of motivation and policy in people who’d been lying to him when they told him the most basic facts he’d believed.

Go on instinct? Worst , worst thing the paidhi could ever do for a situation. Instinct was human. Feelings were human. Reasonable expectations were definitely human…

Ilisidi said they should get underway, then. It was a good fifty miles, atevi reckoning, and she thought they could get there by midnight.

“Speed’s what we can do,” she said, “that these city‑folk won’t expect. They don’t think in terms of mecheiti crossing hills like this that fast. Damn lot they’ve forgotten. Damn lot about this land they never learned.”

She leaned on her cane, getting up. He wanted to believe in Ilisidi. He wanted to trust the things she said. Emotionally… based in human psyche… he wanted to think she loved the land and wanted to save it.

Intellectually, he wanted answers about sending the mecheiti back to Malguri–where there were, supposedly, rebels having breakfast off the historic china.

He didn’t get up with the rest. He waited until the medic packed up and moved off.

“Banichi‑ji,” he said on his knees and as quietly as he could. “She’s sending the mecheiti away. We might still need them. Is this reasonable, nadi‑ji?”

Banichi’s yellow eyes remained frustratingly expressionless. He blinked once. The mouth–offered not a thing.

“Banichi. Why?”

“Why–what?”

“ Why did Tabini do what he did? Why didn’t he just damn ask me where I stood?”

“Go get on, nadi.”

“Why did you get mad when I came to help you? Cenedi would have left you, with no help, no–”

“I said, Get on. We’re leaving.”

“Am I that totally wrong , Banichi? Just answer me. Why is she sending the mecheiti back, before we know we’re safe?”

“Get me up,” Banichi said, and reached for Jago’s hand. Bren caught the other arm, and Banichi made it up, wobbly, testing the splinted ankle. It didn’t work. Banichi gasped, and used their combined help to hobble over to his mecheita and grab the mounting‑straps.

“Banichi‑ji.” It was the last privacy he and Banichi and Jago might have for hours, and he was desperate. “Banichi, these people are lying to us. Why?”

Banichi looked at him, and for one dreadful moment, he had the feeling what it must be to face Banichi… professionally.

But Banichi turned then, grasped the highest of the straps on the riding‑pad, and with a jump that belied his size and weight, managed to get most of the way up without even needing the mecheita to drop the shoulder. Jago gave him the extra shove that put him across the pad and Banichi caught up the rein, letting the splinted leg dangle.

Banichi didn’t need his help. Atevi didn’t have friends, atevi left each other to die. The paidhi was supposed to reason through that fact of life and death and find a rationale other humans could accept to explain it all.

But at the moment, with bruises wherever atevi had laid hands on him, the paidhi didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, refused to understand why Banichi should have died back there, for no damned reason, or why Banichi was lying to him, too.

Men were getting up, ready to move out. If he wasn’t on Nokhada, Nokhada would leave him, he had no doubt of it, they’d have to come back to get the reason–he still supposed–of this whole exercise, and nobody was going to be damned happy with him. He quickened his pace, limped across the slant of the hill and caught Nokhada.

Then he heard the tread of someone leading a mecheita in his tracks across the sodden leaves. He faced around.

It was Jago. A very angry Jago. “Nadi,” she said. “You don’t have the only valid ideas in the world. Tabini‑ji told you where to be, what to do. You do those things.”

He shoved up the rain‑cloak plastic and the sleeve of his coat, showing the livid marks still on his wrist. “That, for their hospitality last night, that, for the dowager’s questions–which I’ve answered, Jago‑ji, answered well enough that they believe me. It’s not my damn fault, whatever’s going on. I don’t know what I’ve done since the dowager’s apartment, that you look at me like that.”

Jago slapped him across the face, so hard he rocked back against Nokhada’s ribs.

“Do as you’re told!” Jago said. “Do I hear more questions, nadi?”

“No,” he said, tasting blood. His eyes were watering. Jago walked off from him in his blurred vision and got on her mecheita, her back to him the while.

He hit Nokhada harder than his wont. Nokhada dropped her shoulder and stayed down until he had his foot in the stirrup and landed astride. He kicked blindly, angrily, after the stirrup, fought the rain‑cloak out of his way as he felt Nokhada jolt into motion. A low vine raked his head and defensive arm.

Jago hadn’t hit with all her force–left the burn of her hand on his face, but that was nothing. It was the anger– hers and his, that found a vital, painful spot and dug in deep.

He didn’t know what he’d said–or done. He didn’t know how he’d come to deserve her temper or her calculated spite, except Jago didn’t like the questions he’d asked Banichi. He’d trod on something, a saner voice tried to say to him. He might have vital keys if he shut down any personal feeling, remembered exactly what he’d asked, or exactly what anyone had said. It was his job to do that. Even if atevi didn’t want him doing it. Even if he wasn’t going to get where they promised him he was going.

He lost the hillside a moment. He was on Ilisidi’s balcony, in the biting wind, in the dark, where Ilisidi challenged him with facts, and the truth that he couldn’t trust now to be the truth, the way he couldn’t pull the pieces of recent argument out of his memory.

He was on the mountain, alone, seeing only the snow–

On the rain‑drenched hillside, with Jago deserting Banichi, cursing him for going after her own partner–and in the smoke, with the ricocheting bullets left and right of him.

The cellar swallowed him, a moment of dark, of helpless terror–he didn’t know why the images tumbled one over the other, flashed up, replacing the rainy thicket and the sight of Ilisidi and Cenedi ahead of him.

The shock of last night had set in–a natural reaction, he told himself, like the details of an accident coming back, replaying themselves over what was going on around him–only he wasn’t doing it in safety. There wasn’t any safety anywhere around him. There might never be again, only the bombs had stopped falling, and he had to focus and deal with what was ringing alarm bells through the here and now.

Banichi had challenged Ilisidi on the preparation of those bombs for a reason.

Banichi wasn’t a reckless man. He’d been probing for something, and he’d gotten it: Ilisidi had come back on him with a What do you know? and Banichi had claimed to know nothing of Tabini’s plans, implicitly challenging Ilisidi again to take him to that cellar and see what they could get.

Where was Banichi’s motive in the confrontation? Where was Ilisidi’s in the question, with so much tottering uncertain?

Putting Tabini’s intentions in question…

God, the mind was going. He was losing the threads. They were multiplying on him, his thoughts darting this way and that way… not making sense and then making him terribly, irrationally afraid he still hadn’t figured the people he was with.

Jago hadn’t backed Banichi, anywhere in the argument. Jago had attacked him , told him to shut up, followed him across the hill to say exactly what she’d already told him and then hit him in the face. Hard.

Nobody had objected to Jago hitting him. Ilisidi hadn’t. Banichi hadn’t. They’d surely seen it. And nobody stopped her. Nobody objected. Nobody cared, because the human in the party didn’t read the signals and maybe everybody else knew why Jago had done it.

The threads kept running, proliferating, tangling. The dark was all around him for a moment, and he lost his balance–caught himself, heart thumping, with a hand on Nokhada’s rain‑wet shoulder.

It was the cellar again. He heard footsteps, but they were an illusion, he knew they were. He’d taken a knock on the head and it hurt like hell, shooting pains through his brain. The footsteps went away when he insisted to see the storm‑gray of the hills, to feel the cold drops off the branches above him trickling down his neck. Nokhada’s jarring gait scarcely hurt him now.

But Banichi was alive. He’d made that choice, whatever atevi understood. He couldn’t have gone off and left him and Jago, to go off with Ilisidi–he didn’t know what part of a human brain had made that decision, the way atevi didn’t consciously know why they, like mecheiti, darted after the leader, come hell come havoc–he hadn’t thought, hadn’t damned well thought about the transaction, that the paidhi’s life was what aijiin were shooting each other for. It hadn’t mattered to him, in that moment, running down that slope, and he still didn’t know that it mattered–not to Tabini, who could get a replacement for him in an hour, who wasn’t going to listen to him in anyone else’s hands, and who wasn’t going to pay a damn thing to get him back, so the joke was on the people who thought he would. He didn’t know anything. It was all too technical–so that joke was on them, too.

The only thing he had of value was in the computer–which he ought to drop into the nearest deep ravine, or slam onto a rock, except it wouldn’t take out the storage–and if they collected it, it wasn’t saying atevi experts couldn’t get those pieces to work. And experts weren’t the people he wanted to have their hands on it.

He should have done a security erase. If he’d had the power to turn it on.

God, do what to save that situation, tip them off it was valuable? Make an issue, then botch getting rid of it?

Just leave it in the bag, let Nokhada carry it back to Malguri?

The rebels were sitting in Malguri.

Dark. The steps coming and going.

The beast on the wall. Lonely after all these centuries.

He couldn’t talk to Banichi. Banichi couldn’t walk, couldn’t fight them–he couldn’t believe Banichi lying back like that, resigning the argument and all their lives to Cenedi.

But Cenedi was a professional. Like Banichi. Maybe together they understood things he couldn’t.

Jago crossed the width of the hill to blame him and hit him in the face.

Cold and dark. Footsteps in the hall. Voices discussing having a drink, fading away up the steps.

A gun was against his skull and he thought of snow, snow all around him. And not a living soul. Like Banichi. Just shut it out.

Give it up.

He didn’t understand. Giri was dead. Bombs just dropped and spattered pieces all over the hill, and he didn’t know why, it didn’t make any sense why a bomb fell on one man and not another. Bombs didn’t care. Killing him must be as good as having him, in the minds of their enemies.

Which wasn’t what Cenedi had said.

There began to be a sea‑echo in his skull, the ache where Cenedi had hit him and the one where Jago had, both gone to one pain, that kept him aware where he was.

In his own apartment, before Cenedi’s message had come, before she’d left, Jago had said… I’ll never betray you, nadi Bren.

I’ll never betray you…

XIV

« ^ »

N ot doing well, he wasn’t–with one pain shooting through his eyes and another running through his elbow to the pit of his stomach, while two or three other point‑sources contested for his attention. The rain had whipped up to momentary thunder and a fit of deluge, then subsided to wind‑borne drizzles, a cold mist so thick one breathed it. The sky was a boiling gray, while the mecheiti struck a steady, long‑striding pace one behind the other, Babs leading the way up and down the rain‑shadowed narrows, along brushy stretches of streamside, where frondy ironheart trailed into their path and dripped water on their heads and down their necks.

But there wasn’t the same jostling for the lead, now, among the foremost mecheiti. It seemed it wasn’t just Nokhada, after all. None of them were fighting, whether Ilisidi had somehow communicated that through Babs, or whether somehow, after the bombs, and in the misery of the cold rain, even the mecheiti understood a common urgency. The established order of going had Nokhada fourth in line behind another of Ilisidi’s guards.

One, two, three, four, regular as a heartbeat, pace, pace, pace, pace.

Never betray you. Hell.

More tea? Cenedi asked him.

And sent him to the cellar.

His eyes watered with the throbbing in his skull and with the wind blasting into his face, and the desire to beat Cenedi’s head against a rock grew totally absorbing for a while. But it didn’t answer the questions, and it didn’t get him back to Mospheira.

Just to some damned place where Ilisidi had friends.

Another alarm bell, he thought. Friends. Atevi didn’t have friends. Atevi had man’chi , and hadn’t someone said–he thought it was Cenedi himself–that Ilisidi hadn’t man’chi to anyone?

They crossed no roads–with not a phone line, not a tilled field, not the remote sound of a motor, only the regular thump of the mecheiti’s gait on wet ground, the creak of harness, even, harsh breathing–it hypnotized, mile after rain‑drenched and indistinguishable mile. The dwindling day had a lucent, gray sameness. Sunlight spread through the clouds no matter what the sun’s angle with the hills.

Ilisidi reined back finally in a flat space and with a grimace and a resettling on Babs’ back, ordered the four heavier men to trade off to the unridden mecheiti.

That included Cenedi; and Banichi, who complained and elected to do it by leaning from one mecheita to the other, as only one of the other men did–as if Banichi and mecheiti weren’t at all unacquainted.

Didn’t hurt himself. Expecting that event, Bren watched with his lip between his teeth until Banichi had straightened himself around.

He caught Jago’s eye then and saw a biding coldness, total lack of expression–directed at him.

Because human and atevi hormones were running the machinery, now, he told himself, and the lump he had in his throat and the thump of emotion he had when he reacted to Jago’s cold disdain composed the surest prescription for disaster he could think of.

Shut it down, he told himself. Do the job. Think it through.

Jago didn’t come closer. The whole column sorted itself out in the prior order, and Nokhada’s first jerking steps carried him out of view.

When he looked back, Banichi was riding as he had been, hands braced against the mecheita’s shoulders, head bowed–Banichi was suffering, acutely, and he didn’t know whether the one of their company who seemed to be a medic, and who’d had a first aid kit, had also had a pain‑killer, or whether Banichi had taken one or not, but a broken ankle, splinted or not. had to be swelling, dangling as it was, out of the stirrup on that side.

Banichi’s condition persuaded him that his own aches and pains were ignorable. And it frightened him, what they might run into and what, with Banichi crippled, and with Ilisidi willing to leave him once, they could do if they met trouble at the end of the ride‑–if Wigairiin wasn’t in allied hands.

Or if Ilisidi hadn’t told the truth about her intentions–because it occurred to him she’d said no to the rebels in Maidingi, but she’d equally well been conspiring with Wigairiin, evidently, as he picked it up, as an old associate only apt to come in with the rebels if Ilisidi did.

That meant queasy relationships and queasy alliances, fragile ties that could do anything under stress.

In the cellar, they’d recorded his answers to their questions–they said it was all machimi, all play‑acting, no validity.

But that tape still existed, if Ilisidi hadn’t destroyed it. She’d not have left it behind in Malguri, for the people that were supposedly her jilted allies.

If Ilisidi hadn’t destroyed it–they had that tape, and they had it with them.

He reined back, disturbing the column. He feigned a difficulty with the stirrup, and stayed bent over as rider after rider passed him at that rapid, single‑minded pace.

He let up on the rein when Banichi passed him, and the hindmost guards had pulled back, too, moving in on him. “Banichi, there’s a tape recording,” he said. “Of me. Interrogation about the gun.”

At which point he gave Nokhada a thump of his heel and slipped past the guards, as Nokhada quickened pace.

Nokhada butted the fourth raecheita in the rump as she arrived, not gently, with the war‑brass, and the other man had to pull in hard to prevent a fight.

“Forgive me, nadi,” Bren said breathlessly, heart thumping. “I had my stirrup twisted.”

It was still a near fight. It helped Nokhada’s flagging spirits immensely, even if she didn’t get the spot in line.

It didn’t at all help his headache, or the hurt in his arm, half of it now. he thought, from Nokhada’s war for the rein.

The gray daylight slid subtly into night, a gradual dimming to a twilight of wind‑driven rain, a ghostly half‑light that slipped by eye‑tricking degrees into blackest, starless night. He had thought they would have to slow down when night fell–but atevi eyes could deal with the dark, and maybe mecheiti could: Babs kept that steady, ground‑devouring pace, laboring only when they had to climb, never breaking into exuberance or lagging on the lower places; and Nokhada made occasional sallies forward, complaining with tosses of her head and jolts in her gait when the third‑rank mecheita cut her off, one constant, nightmare battle just to keep control of the creature, to keep his ears attuned for the whisper of leaves ahead that forewarned him to duck some branch the first riders had ducked beneath in the dark.

The rain must have stopped for some while before he even noticed, there was so much water dripping and blowing from the leaves generally above them.

But when they broke out into the clear, the clouds had gone from overhead, affording a panorama of stars and shadowy hills that should have relieved his sense of claustrophobic dark–but all he could think of was the ship presence that threatened the world and the fact that, if they didn’t reach this airstrip by dawn, they’d be naked to attack from Maidingi Airport.

By midnight, Ilisidi had said, they’d reach Wigairiin, and that hour was long since past, if he could still read the pole stars.

Only let me die, he began to think, exhausted and in pain, when they began to climb again, and climb, and climb the stony hill. Ilisidi called a halt, and he supposed that they were going to trade off again, and that it meant they’d as long to go as they’d already ridden.

But he saw the ragged edge of ironheart against the night sky above them on the hill, and Ilisidi said they should all get down, they’d gone as far as the mecheiti would take them.

Then he wished they had a deal more of riding to go, because it suddenly dawned on him that all bets were called. They were committing themselves, now, to a course in which neither Banichi nor Jago was going to object, not after Banichi had argued vainly against it at the outset. God, he was scared of this next part.

Banichi didn’t have any help but him–not even Jago, so far as he could tell. He had the computer to manage… his last chance to send it away with Nokhada and hope, hope the handlers, loyal to Ilisidi, would keep it from rebel attention.

But if rebels did hold Malguri now, they’d be very interested when the mecheiti came in–granted anything had gone wrong and they didn’t get a fast flight out of here, the computer was guaranteed close attention. And things could go wrong, very wrong.

Baji‑naji . Leaving it for anyone else was asking too much of Fortune and relying far too much on Chance. He jerked the ties that held the bags on behind the riding‑pad, gathered them up as the most ordinary, the most casual thing in the world, his hands trembling the while, and slid off, gripping the mounting‑straps to steady his shaking knees.

Breath came short. He leaned on Nokhada’s hard, warm shoulder and blacked out a moment, felt the chill of the cellar about him, the cords holding him. Heard the footsteps–

He tried to lift the bags to his shoulder.

A hand met his and took them away from him. “It’s no weight for me,” the man said, and he stood there stupidly, locked between believing in a compassion atevi didn’t have and fearing the canniness that might well have Cenedi behind it–he didn’t know, he couldn’t think, he didn’t want to make an issue about it, when it was even remotely possible they didn’t even realize he had the machine with him. Djinana had brought it. The handlers had loaded it.

The man walked off. Nokhada brushed him aside and wandered off across the hill in a general movement of the mecheiti: a man among Ilisidi’s guard had gotten onto Babs and started away as the whole company began to move out, afoot now, presumably toward the wall Ilisidi had foretold, where, please God, the gate would be open, the way Ilisidi had said, nothing would be complicated and they could all board the plane that would carry them straight to Shejidan.

The man who’d taken the bags outpaced him with long, sure strides up the hill in the dark, up where Cenedi and Ilisidi were walking, which only confirmed his worst suspicions, and he needed to keep that man in sight–he needed to advise Banichi what was going on, but Banichi was leaning on Jago and on another man, further down the slope, falling behind.

He didn’t know which to go to, then–he couldn’t get a private word with Banichi, he couldn’t keep up with both. He settled for limping along halfway between the two groups, damning himself for not being quicker with an answer that would have stopped the man from taking the saddlebags and not coming up with anything now that would advise Banichi what was in that bag without advising the guard with him–as good as shout it aloud, as say anything to Banichi now.

Claim he needed something from his personal kit?

It might work. He worked forward, out of breath, the hill going indistinct on him by turns.

“Nadi,” he began to say.

But as he came up on the man, he saw the promised wall in front of them, at the very crest of the hill. The ancient gate was open on a starlit, weed‑grown road.

They were already at Wigairiin.

XV

« ^ »

T he wall was a darkness, the gate looked as if it could never again move on its hinges.

The shadows of Ilisidi and Cenedi went among the first into an area of weeds and ancient cobblestones, of old buildings, a road like the ceremonial road of the Bu‑javid, maybe of the same pre‑Ragi origin–the mind came up with the most irrational, fantastical wanderings, Bren thought, desperately tagging the one of Ilisidi’s guards who had his baggage, and his computer.

Banichi and Jago were behind him somewhere. The ones in front were going in as much haste as Ilisidi could manage, using her cane and Cenedi’s assistance, which could be quite brisk when Ilisidi decided to move, and she had.

“I can take it now, nadi,” Bren said, trying to liberate the strap of his baggage from the man’s shoulder much as the man had gotten it away from him. “It’s no great difficulty. I need something from the kit.”

“No time now to look for anything, nand’ paidhi,” the man said. “Just stay up with us. Please.”

It was damned ridiculous. He lost a step, totally off his balance, and then grew angry and desperate, which didn’t at all inform him what was reasonable to do. Stick close to the man, raise no more issue about the bags until they stopped, try to claim there was medication he had to have as soon as they got to the plane and then stow the thing under his seat, out of view… that was the only plan he could come up with, trudging along with aches in every bone he owned and a headache that wasn’t improving with exertion.

They met stairs, open‑air, overgrown with weeds, where the walk began to pass between evidently abandoned buildings. That went more slowly–Ilisidi didn’t deal well with steps; and one of the younger guards simply picked her up after a few steps and carried her in his arms.

Which with Banichi wasn’t an option. Bren looked back, lagged behind, and one of the guards near him took his arm and pulled him along, saying,

“Keep with us, nand’ paidhi, do you need help?”

“No,” he said, and started to say, Banichi does.

Something banged. A shot hit the man he was talking to, who staggered against the wall. Shots kept coming, racketing and ricocheting off the walls beside the walk, as the man, holding his side, jerked him into cover in a doorway and shoved his head down as gunfire broke out from every quarter.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Bren gasped, but the guard with him slumped down and the fire kept up. He tried in the dark and by touch to find where the man was hit–he felt a bloody spot, and tried for a pulse, and couldn’t find it. The man had a limpness he’d never felt in a body–dead, he told himself, shaking, while the fire bounced off walls and he couldn’t tell where it was coming from, or even which side of it was his.

Banichi and Jago had been coming up the steps. The man lying inert against his knee had pulled him into a protected nook that seemed to go back among the weeds, and he thought it might be a way around and down the hill that didn’t involve going out onto the walk again.

He let the man slide as he got up, made a foolish attempt to cushion the man’s head as he slid down, and in agitation got up into a crouch and felt his way along the wall, scared, not knowing where Ilisidi and Cenedi had gone or whether it was Tabini’s men or the rebels or what.

He kept going as far as the wall did, and it turned a corner and went downhill a good fifty or so feet before it met another wall, in a pile of old leaves. He retreated, and met still another when he tried in the other direction.

The gunfire stopped, then. Everything stopped. He sank down with his shoulders against the wall of the cul de sac and listened, trying to still his own ragged breaths and stop shaking.

It grew so still he could hear the wind moving the leaves about in the ruins.

What is this place? he asked himself, seeing nothing when he looked back down the alleyway but a lucent slice of night sky, starlight on old brick and weeds, and a section of the walk. He listened and listened, and asked himself what kind of place Ilisidi had directed them into, and why Banichi and Jago didn’t realize the place was an ancient ruin. It felt as if he’d fallen into a hole in time–a personal one, in which he couldn’t hear the movements he thought he should hear, just his own occasional gasps for breath and a leaf skittering down the pavings.

No sound of a plane.

No sound of anyone moving.

They couldn’t all be dead. They had to be hiding, the way he was. If he went on moving in this quiet, somebody might hear him, and he couldn’t reason out who’d laid the ambush–only it seemed likeliest that if they’d just opened fire, they didn’t care if they killed the paidhi, and that sounded like the people out of Maidingi Airport who’d lately been dropping bombs.

So Ilisidi and Cenedi were wrong, and Banichi was right, and their enemies had gotten into the airport here, if there truly was an airport here at all.

Nobody was moving anywhere right now. Which could mean a lot of casualties, or it could mean that everybody was sitting still and waiting for the other side to move first, so they could hear where they were.

Atevi saw in the dark better than humans. To atevi eyes, there was a lot of light in the alley, if somebody looked down this way.

He rolled onto his hands and a knee, got up and went as quietly as he could back into the dead end of the alley, sat down again and tried to think–because if he could get to Banichi, or Cenedi, or any of the guards, granted these were Ilisidi’s enemies no less than his–there was a chance of somebody knowing where he was going, which he didn’t; and having a gun, which he didn’t; and having the military skills to get them out of this, which he didn’t.

If he tried downhill, to go back into the woods–but they were fools if they weren’t watching the gate.

If he could possibly escape out into the countryside… there was the township they’d mentioned, Fagioni–but there was no way he could pass for atevi, and Cenedi or Ilisidi, one or the other, had said Fagioni wouldn’t be safe if the rebels had Wigairiin.

He could try to live off the land and just go until he got to a politically solid border–but it had been no few years since botany, and he gave himself two to three samples before he mistook something and poisoned himself.

Still, if there wasn’t a better chance, it was a chance–a man could live without food, as long as there was water to drink, a chance he was prepared to take, but–atevi night‑vision being that much better, and atevi hearing being quite acute–a move now seemed extremely risky.

More, Banichi must have seen him ahead of him on the steps, and if Banichi and Jago were still alive… there was a remote hope of them locating him. He was, he had to suppose, a priority for everyone, the ones he wanted to find him and the ones he most assuredly didn’t.

His own priority… unfortunately… no one served. He’d lost the computer. He had no idea where the man with his baggage had gone, or whether he was alive or dead; and he couldn’t go searching out there. Damned mess, he said to himself, and hugged his arms about him beneath the heat‑retaining rain‑cloak, which didn’t help much at all where his body met the rain‑chilled bricks and paving.

Damned mess, and at no point had the paidhi been anything but a liability to Ilisidi, and to Tabini.

The paidhi was sitting freezing his rump in a dead‑end alley, where he had no way to maneuver if he heard a search coming, no place to hide, and a systematic search was certainly going to find him, if he didn’t do something like work back down the hill where he’d last seen Banichi and Jago, and where the gate was surely guarded by one side or the other.

He couldn’t fight an ateva hand to hand. Maybe he might find a loose brick.

If–He heard someone moving. He sat and breathed quietly, until after several seconds the sound stopped.

He wrapped the cloak about him to prevent the plastic rustling. Then, one hand braced on the wall to avoid a scuff of cold‑numbed feet, he gathered himself up and went as quickly and quietly as his stiff legs would carry him, in the only direction the alley afforded him.

He reached the guard’s body, where it lay at the entry to the alley, touched him to be sure beyond a doubt he hadn’t left a wounded man, and the man was already cold.

That was the company he had, there in the entry where old masonry made a nook where a human could squeeze in and hide, and a crack through which he could see the walk outside, through a scraggle of weeds.

Came the least small sound of movement somewhere, up or down the hill, he wasn’t sure. He found himself short of breath, tried to keep absolutely still.

He saw a man then, through the crack, a man with a gun, searching the sides and the length of the walk–a man without a rain‑cloak, in a different jacket than anyone in Cenedi’s company.

One of the opposition, for certain. Looking down every alley. And coming to his.

He drew a deep, deep breath, leaned his head back against the masonry and turned his face into the shadow, tucked his pale hands under his arms. He heard the steps come very close, stop, almost within the reach of his arm. He guessed that the searcher was examining the guard’s body.

God, the guard was armed. He hadn’t even thought about it. He heard a soft movement, a click, from where the searcher was examining the body. He daren’t risk turning his head. He stayed utterly still, until finally the searcher went all the way down the alley. A flashlight flared on the walls down at the dead end, where he had recently hidden. He stayed still and tried not to shiver in his narrow concealment while the man walked back again, this time using the flashlight.

The beam stopped short of him. The searcher cut the flashlight off again, perhaps fearing snipers, and, stepping over the guard’s body, went his way down the hill.

Mopping up, he thought, drawing ragged breaths. When he was as sure as he could make himself that the search had passed him, he got down and searched the dead guard for weapons.

The holster was empty. There was no gun in either hand, nor under the body.

Damn, he thought. He didn’t naturally think in terms of weapons, they weren’t his ordinary resort, and he’d made a foolish and perhaps a fatal mistake–he was up against professionals, and he was probably still making mistakes, like in being in this dead end alley and not thinking about the gun before the searcher picked it up; they were doing everything right and he was doing everything wrong, so far, except they hadn’t caught him.

He didn’t know where to go, had no concept of the place, just of where he’d been, but he’d be wise, he decided, at least to get out of the cul de sac; and following the search seemed better than being in front of it.

He got up, wrapped the cloak about him to be as dark as he could, and started out.

But the same instant he heard voices down the street and ducked back into his nook, heart pounding.

He didn’t know where the solitary searcher had gone. He grew uncertain what was going on out there now–whether the search might have turned back, or changed objectives. He didn’t know what a professional like Banichi might know or expect: having no skill at stealth, he decided the only possible advantage he could make for himself was patience, simply outlasting them in staying still in a concealment one close search hadn’t penetrated. They hadn’t night‑scopes, none of the technology humans had known without question atevi would immediately apply to weaponry. They didn’t use any tracking animals, except mecheiti, and he hoped there were no mecheiti on the other side. He’d seen one man ripped up.

He stood in shadow while the searchers passed, also bound downhill, and while they, too, checked over the dead man almost at his feet, and likewise sent a man down to look through the alley to the end. They talked together in low voices, some of it too faint to hear, but they talked about a count on their enemies, and agreed that this was the third sure kill.

They went away, then, down the hill, toward the gate.

A long while later he heard a commotion from that quarter, a calling out of instructions, by the tone of it. The voices stopped; the movements went on for some time, and eventually he saw other men, not their own, walking down toward the gate.

That way of escape was shut, then. There wasn’t a way out the gate. If any of their party was alive, they weren’t going to linger down there, he could reason that. The force was concentrating behind him for a sweep forward, and he visualized what he in his untrained and native intelligence would do–hold that gate shut until morning and scour the area inside the gate by daylight.

He took a breath, looked through the screen of weeds growing in the chinks in the wall near his head, and ducked out again onto the walk, wrapped in his plastic cloak and aiming immediately for the next best cover, a nook further on.

He found another alley. He took it, trying to find somewhere in it a small dark hole that a searcher might not automatically think to look into even in a daylight search. He could fit where adult atevi wouldn’t fit. He could squeeze into places searchers couldn’t follow and might not realize a human could fit.

He followed the alley around two turns, feared it might dead‑end like the other one, then saw open space ahead–saw flat ground, blue lights, and a hill, and a great house sprawling up and up that hill, with its own wall, and white lights showing.

Wigairiin, he said to himself, and saw the jet down at the end of the runway, sitting in shadow, its windows dark, its engines silent.

Ilisidi hadn’t lied, then. Cenedi hadn’t. There was a plane and it had waited for them. But something had gone terribly wrong, the enemy had moved in, taken Wigairiin the way Banichi had warned them they might. Banichi had been right and no one had listened, and he was here, in the mess he was in.

Banichi had said Tabini would move against the rebels–but there was that ship up in the heavens, and Tabini couldn’t talk to Mospheira unless they’d sent Hanks, and, damn the woman. Hanks wasn’t going to be helpful to an aiji fighting to solidify his support, to a population dissolving uneasy associations and lesser aijiin trying to position themselves to survive the fall of the aiji in Shejidan. Hanks had outright said to him that the country assocations didn’t matter, he’d argued otherwise, and Hanks had refused to understand why he adamantly took the position that they did.

All around him was the evidence that they did.

And Ilisidi and Cenedi hadn’t lied to him. The plane existed–no one had lied, after all, not their fault the rebels had figured their plan. It got to his gut that, at least that far, the atevi he was with hadn’t betrayed him. Ilisidi had possibly meant all along to go to Shejidan–until something had gone mortally wrong. He leaned against the wall with a knot in his throat, light‑headed, and trying to reason, all the same, it didn’t mean they didn’t mean to go somewhere else, but after hours convinced they were being dragged into a trap, knowing at least that the trap closing around him was not the doing of people he’d felt friendly…

Felt friendly, felt, friendly … Two words the paidhi didn’t use, but the paidhi was clearly over the edge of personal and professional judgment. He wiped at his eyes with a shaking hand, ventured as carefully as he knew along the frontage of abandoned buildings, among weeds and past old machinery, still looking for that place to hide, with no idea how long he might have to hold out, not knowing how long he could hold out, against the hope of Tabini taking Maidingi and moving forces in to Wigairiin along the same route they’d come.

Give or take a few days, a few weeks, it might happen, if he could stay free. Rainy season. He wouldn’t die of thirst, hiding out in the ruins. A man could go unfed for a week or so, just not move much. He just needed a place–any place, but best one where he might have some view of what came and went.

He saw old tanks of some kind ahead, facing the field, oil or jet fuel or something, he wasn’t sure, but the ground was grown up with weeds and they didn’t look used. They offered a place, maybe, to hide in the shadows where they met the wall–his enemies might expect him down closer to the gate, not on the edge of the field, watching them, right up in an area where they probably worked…

Another, irrational flash on the cellar. He didn’t see where he was, saw that dusty basement instead and knew he was doing it. He reached out and put his hand on the wall to steady himself–retained presence of mind enough at least to know he should watch his feet, there’d been other kinds of debris around, in a disorder not ordinary for atevi. Old machine parts, old scrap lumber, old building stone, in an area Wigairiin clearly didn’t keep up.

Knocked down an ancient wall to build the airstrip, Ilisidi had said that. Didn’t care much for the old times.

Ilisidi did. Didn’t agree with the aijiin of Wigairiin on that point.

They’d talked about dragonettes, and preserving a national treasure. And the treasure was being blasted with explosives and atevi were killing each other–for fear of humans, in the name of Tabini‑aiji, sitting where Ilisidi had worked all her life to be–

Dragonettes soaring down the cliffs.

Atevi antiquities, leveled to build a runway, so a progressive local aiji didn’t have to take a train to Maidingi.

He reached the tanks, felt the rusted metal flake on his hands–blind in the dark, he slid down and squirmed his way into the nook they made with the wall–lay down, then, in the wet weeds underneath the braces.

Wasn’t sure where he was for a moment. He didn’t hurt as much. Couldn’t see that conveniently out of the hole he’d found, just weeds in front of his face. His heart beat so heavily it jarred the bones of his chest. He’d never felt it do that. Didn’t hurt, exactly, nothing did, more than the rest of him. Cold on one side, not on the other, thanks to the rain‑cloak.

He’d found cover. He didn’t have to move from here. He could shut his eyes.

He didn’t have to think, either, just rest, let the aches go numb.

He wished he’d done better than he’d done.

Didn’t know how he could have. He was alive and they hadn’t found him. Better than some of the professionals had scored. Better luck than poor Giri, who’d been a decent man.

Better luck than the man who’d dragged him to cover before he died–the man hadn’t thought about it, he supposed; he’d just done, just moved. He supposed it made most difference what a man was primed to do. Call it love. Call it duty. Call it–whatever mecheiti did, when the bombs fell around them and they still followed the mecheit’‑aiji.

Man’chi . Didn’t mean duty. That was the translation on the books. But what had made the man grab him with the last thought he had–that was man’chi , too. The compulsion. The drive that held the company together.

They said Ilisidi hadn’t any. That aijiin didn’t. Cosmic loneliness. Absolute freedom. Babs. Ilisidi. Tabini.

I send you a man, ’Sidi‑ji …

Wasn’t anything Tabini wouldn’t do, wasn’t anything or anyone Tabini wouldn’t spend. Human‑wise, he still liked the bastard.

He still liked Banichi.

If anybody was alive, Banichi was. And Banichi would have done what that man had done with the last breath in him–but Banichi wouldn’t make dying his first choice: the bastards would pay for Banichi’s life, and Jago’s.

Damn well bet they were free. They were Tabini’s, and Tabini wasn’t here to worry about.

Just him.

They’d have found him if they could.

Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. One ran down and puddled on the side of his nose. One ran down his cheek to drip off into the weeds. Atevi didn’t cry. One more cosmic indignity nature spared the atevi.

But, over all, decent folk, like the old couple with the grandkids, impulses that didn’t add up to love, but they felt something profound that humans couldn’t feel, either. Something maybe he’d come closer to than any paidhi before him had come–

Don’t wait for the atevi to feel love. The paidhi trained himself to bridge the gap. Give up on words. Try feeling man’chi .

Try feeling why Cenedi’d knocked hell out of him for going after Banichi on that shell‑riddled road, try feeling what Cenedi had thought, plain as shouting it: identical man’chi , options pre‑chosen. The old question, the burning house, what a man would save…

Tabini’s people, with their own man’chi , together, in Ilisidi’s company.

Jago, violate man’chi ?

Not Banichi’s partner.

I won’t betray you, Bren‑ji …

Shut up, nadi Bren .

Believe in Jago, even when you didn’t understand her. Feel the warm feeling, call it whatever you wanted; she was on your side, same as Banichi.

Warm feeling. That was all.

There was early daylight bouncing off the pavings. And someone running. Someone shouting. Bren tried to move–his neck was stiff. He couldn’t move his left arm from under him, and his right arm and his legs and his back were their own kind of misery. He’d slept, didn’t remember picking the position, and he couldn’t damned move.

“ Hold it !” came from somewhere outside.

He reached out and cautiously flattened the weeds in front of his nose, with the vast shadow of the tank over his head and the wall cramping his ankle and his knee at an angle.

Couldn’t see anything but a succession of buildings along the runway. Modern buildings. He didn’t know how he’d gotten from ruins to here last night. But it was cheap modern, concrete prefab–two buildings, a windsock. Electric power for the landing lights, he guessed; maybe a waiting area or a machine shop. The wall next to the tank above him was modern, he discovered, sinking down again to ease the strain on his back.

Left arm hurt, dammit. Good and stiff. The legs weren’t much better. Couldn’t quite straighten the one and couldn’t, with the one shoulder stiff, conveniently turn over and get more room.

Gunshots. Several.

Someone of their company, still alive out there. He listened to the silence after, trying to tell himself it wasn’t his affair, and wondering who’d be the last caught, the last killed–he couldn’t but think it could well be Banichi or Jago, while he hid, shivering, and knowing there wasn’t a damned thing he could do.

He felt–he didn’t know what. Guilty for hiding. Angry for atevi having to die for him. For other atevi being willing to kill, for mistaken, stupid reasons, and humans doing things that had nothing to do with atevi–in human minds.

Someone shouted–he couldn’t hear what. He wriggled up on the elbow again, used the back of his hand to flatten the weeds on the view he had of the space between his building and the other frontages.

He saw Cenedi, and Ilisidi, the dowager leaning on Cenedi’s arm, limping badly, the two of them under guard of four rough‑looking men in leather jackets, a braid with a blue and red ribbon on the one of them with his back to him–

Blue and red. Blue and red. Brominandi’s province.

Damn him, he thought, and saw them shove Cenedi against the wall of the building as they jerked Ilisidi by the arm and made her drop her cane. Cenedi came away from the wall bent on stopping them, and they stopped him with a rifle butt.

A second blow, when Cenedi tried to stand up. Cenedi wasn’t a young man.

“Where’s the paidhi?” they asked. “Where is he?”

“Shejidan, by now,” he heard Ilisidi say.

They didn’t swallow it. They hit Ilisidi, and Cenedi swung at the bastards, kicked one in the head before he took a blow from a rifle butt full in the back and another one on the other side, which knocked him to one knee.

They had a gun to Ilisidi’s head, then, and told him stop,

Cenedi did stop, and they hit him again and once more.

“Where’s the paidhi?” they kept asking, and hauled Cenedi up by the collar. “We’ll shoot her,” they said.

But Cenedi didn’t know. Couldn’t betray him, even to save Ilisidi, because Cenedi didn’t know.

“Hear us?” they asked, and slapped Cenedi in the face, slamming his head back into the wall.

They’d do it. They were going to do it. Bren moved, bashed his head on the tank over him, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, and, finding a rock among the weeds, he flung it.

That upset the opposition. They shoved Cenedi and Ilisidi back and went casting about for who’d done it, talking on their radio to their associates.

He really had hoped Cenedi could have taken advantage of that break, but they’d had their guns on Ilisidi, and Cenedi wasn’t leaving her or taking any chances with her life–while the search went up and down the frontage and back into the alley.

Boots came near. Bren flattened himself, heart pounding, breaths not giving him air enough.

Boots went away, and a second pair came near.

“Here!” someone shouted.

Oh, damn, he thought.

“You!” the voice bellowed, and he looked up into the barrel of a rifle poking through the weeds, and a man lying flat, the other side of that curtain, staring at him down that rifle barrel, with a certain shock on his face.

Hadn’t seen a human close up, Bren thought–it always jarred his nerves, to see that moment of shock. More so to know there was a finger on the trigger.

“Come out of there,” the man ordered him.

He began to wiggle out of his hole, not noble, nothing gallant about the gesture or the situation. Damned stupid, he said to himself. Probably there was something a lot smarter to have done, but his gut couldn’t take watching a man beaten to death or a brave old woman shot through the head: he wasn’t built that way.

He reached the daylight, crawling on his belly. The rifle barrel pressed against his neck while they gathered around him and searched him all over for weapons.

Besides, he said to himself, the paidhi wasn’t a fighter. The paidhi was a translator, a mediator– words were his skill, and if he was with Ilisidi, he might even have a chance to negotiate. Ilisidi had some kind of previous tie to the rebels. There might be a way out of this…

They jerked the rain‑cloak off him. The snap resisted, the collar ripped across his neck. He tried to get a knee under him, and two men caught him by the arms and jerked him to his feet.

“He’s no more than a kid,” one said in dismay.

“They come that way,” red‑and‑blue said. “I saw the last one. Bring him!”

He tried to walk. Wasn’t doing well at it. The left arm shot blinding pain, and he didn’t think they’d listen to argument, he only wanted to get wherever they were going–and hoped they’d bring Cenedi and Ilisidi with him. He needed Ilisidi, needed someone to negotiate for , himself and his loyalties being the bargaining chip…

Claim man’chi to Ilisidi: they’d read his actions that way–they could, at least, if he lied convincingly.

They hauled him into the next building, and Cenedi and Ilisidi were behind him, held at gunpoint, shoved up against the wall, while they said someone’s neck was broken–the man Cenedi had kicked, Bren thought dazedly, and tried to make eye contact with Ilisidi, staring at her in a way atevi thought rude.

She looked straight at him. Gave a tightening of her mouth he didn’t immediately read, but maybe she caught his offer–

Someone grabbed him by the shirt and spun him around and back against the furniture–red‑and‑blue, it was. A blow exploded across his face, his sight went out, he wasn’t standing under his own power, and he heard Cenedi calmly advising the man humans were fragile and if he hit him like that again he’d kill him.

Nice, he thought. Thanks, Cenedi. You talk to him. Son of a bitch. Tears gathered in his eyes. Dripped. His nose ran, he wasn’t sure with what. The room was a blur when they jerked him upright and somebody held his head up by a fist in his hair.

“Is this yours?” red‑and‑blue asked, and he made out a tan something on the table where red‑and‑blue was pointing.

His heart gave a double beat. The computer. The bag beside it on the table.

They had it on recharge, the wire strung across the table.

“Mine,” he said.

“We want the access.”

He tasted blood, felt something running down his chin that swallowing didn’t stop. Lip was cut.

“ Tell us the access code,” red‑and‑blue said, and gave a jerk on his shirt.

His brain started functioning, then. He knew he wasn’t going to get his hands on the computer. Had to make them axe the system themselves. Had to remember the axe codes. Make them want the answer, make them believe it was all‑important to them.

“Access code!” red‑and‑blue yelled into his face.

Oh, God, he didn’t like this part of the plan.

“Fuck off,” he said.

They didn’t know him. Set himself right on their level with that answer, he did–he had barely time to think that before red‑and‑blue hit him across the face.

Blind and deaf for a moment. Not feeling much. Except they still had hold of him, and voices were shouting, and red‑and‑blue was giving orders about hanging him up. He didn’t entirely follow it, until somebody grabbed his coat by the collar and ripped it and the shirt off him. Somebody else grabbed his hands in front of him and tied them with a stiff leather belt.

He figured it wasn’t good, then. It might be time he should start talking, only they might not believe him. He stood there while they got a piece of electrical cable and flung it over the pipes that ran across the ceiling, using it for a rope. They ran the end through his joined arms and jerked them abruptly over his head.

The shoulder shot fire. He screamed. Couldn’t get his breath.

A belt caught him in the ribs. Once, twice, three times, with all the force of an atevi arm. He couldn’t get his feet under him, couldn’t get a breath, couldn’t organize a thought.

“Access code,” red‑and‑blue said.

He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t get the wind. There was pain, and his mind went white‑out.

“You’ll kill him!” someone screamed. Lungs wouldn’t work. He was going out.

An arm caught him around the ribs. Hauled him up, took his weight off the arms.

“Access,” the voice said. He fought to get a breath.

“Give it to him again,” someone said, and his mind whited out with panic. He was still gasping for air when they let him swing, and somebody was shouting, screaming that he couldn’t breathe.

Arm caught him again. Wood scraped, chair hit the floor. Something else did. Squeezed him hard around the chest and eased up. He got a breath.

Who gave you the gun, nand’ paidhi?

Say it was Tabini.

“Access,” the relentless voice said.

He fought for air against the arm crushing his chest. The shoulder was a dull, bone‑deep pain. He didn’t remember what they wanted. “No,” he said, universal answer. No to everything.

They shoved him off and hit him while he swung free, two and three times. He convulsed, tore the shoulder, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t breathe.

“Access,” someone said, and someone held him so air could get to his lungs, while the shoulder grated and sent pain through his ribs and through his gut.

The gun, he thought. Shouldn’t have had it.

“Access,” the man said. And hit him in the face. A hand came under his chin, then, and an atevi face wavered in his swimming vision. “Give me the access code.”

“Access,” he repeated stupidly. Couldn’t think where he was. Couldn’t think if this was the one he was going to answer or the one he wasn’t.

Second blow across the face.

“The code, paidhi!”

“Code…” Please, God, the code. He was going to be sick with the pain. He couldn’t think how to explain to a fool. “At the prompt…”

“The prompt’s up,” the voice said. “Now what?”

“Type…” He remembered the real access. Kept seeing white when he shut his eyes, and if he drifted off into that blizzard they’d go on hitting him. “Code…” The code for meddlers. For thieves. “Input date.”

“Which?”

“Today’s.” Fool. He heard the rattle of the keyboard. Red‑and‑blue was still with him, someone else holding his head up, by a fist in his hair.

“It says ‘Time,’” someone said.

“Don’t. Don’t give it. Type numeric keys… 1024.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the code, dammit!”

Red‑and‑blue looked away. “Do it.”

Keys rattled.

“What have you got?” red‑and‑blue asked.

‘The prompt’s back again.“

“Is that it?” red‑and‑blue asked.

“You’re in,” he said, and just breathed, listening to the keys, the operator, skillful typist, at least, querying the computer.

Which was going to lie, now. The overlay was engaged. It would lie about its memory, its file names, its configuration… it’d tell anyone who asked that things existed, tell you their file sizes and then bring up various machine code and gibberish, that said, to a computer expert, that the files did exist, protected under separate passcodes.

The level of their questions said it would get him out of Wigairiin. Red‑and‑blue was out of his depth.

“What’s this garbage?” red‑and‑blue demanded, and Bren caught a breath, eyes shut, and asked, in crazed delight:

“Strange symbols?”

“Yes.”

“You’re into addressing. What did you do to it?”

They hit him again.

“I asked the damned file names!”

“Human language.”

Long silence, then. He didn’t like the silence. Red‑and‑blue was a fool. A fool might do something else foolish, like beat him to death trying to learn computer programming. He hung there, fighting for his breaths, trying to get his feet under him, while red‑and‑blue thought about his options.

“We’ve got what we need,” red‑and‑blue said. “Let’s pack them up. Take them down to Negiran.”

Rebel city. Provincial capital. Rebel territory. It was the answer he wanted. He was going somewhere, out of the cold and the mud and the rain, where he could deal with someone of more intelligence, somebody of ambition, somebody with strings the paidhi might figure how to pull, on the paidhi’s own agenda…

“Bring them, too?”

He wasn’t sure who they meant. He turned his head while they were getting him loose from the pipes, and saw Cenedi’s bloodied face. Cenedi didn’t have any expression. Ilisidi didn’t.

Mad, he said to himself. He hoped Cenedi didn’t try any heroics at this point. He hoped they’d just tie Cenedi up and keep him alive until he could do something–had to think of a way to keep Cenedi alive, like ask for Ilisidi.

Make them want Ilisidi’s cooperation. She’d been one of theirs. Betrayed them. But atevi didn’t take that so personally, from aijiin.

He couldn’t walk at first. He yelled when they grabbed the bad arm, and somebody hit him in the head, but a more reasonable voice grabbed him, said his arm was broken, he could just walk if he wanted to.

“I’ll walk,” he said, and tried to, not steadily, held by the good arm. He tried to keep his feet under him. He heard red‑and‑blue talking to his pocket‑com as they went out the door into the cold wind and the sunlight.

He heard the jet engines start up. He looked at the plane sitting on the runway, kicking up dust from its exhaust, and tried to look back to be sure Cenedi and Ilisidi were still with them, but the man holding his arm jerked him back into step and bid fair to break that arm, too.

Long walk, in the wind and the cold. Forever, until the ramp was in front of them, the jet engines at the tail screaming into their ears and kicking up an icy wind against his bare skin. The man holding him let go his arm and he climbed, holding the thin metal handrail with his good hand, a man in front of him, others behind.

He almost fainted on the steps. He entered the sheltered, shadowed interior, and somebody caught his right arm, pulled him aside to clear the doorway. There were seats, empty, men standing back to let them board–Cenedi helped Ilisidi up the steps, and the other men came up after Cenedi.

A jerk on his arm spun him away. He hit a seat and missed sitting in it, trying to recover himself from the moveable seat‑arm as a fight broke out in the doorway, flesh meeting bone, and blood spattering all around him. He turned all the way over on the seat arm, saw Banichi standing by the door with a metal pipe in his hand.

The fight was over, that fast. Men were dead or half‑dead. Ilisidi and Cenedi were on their feet, Jago and three men of their own company were in the exit aisle, and another was standing up at the cockpit, with a gun.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Banichi gasped, and sketched a bow, “Nand’ dowager. Have a seat. Cenedi, up front.”

Bren caught a breath and slumped, bloody as he was, into the airplane seat, with Banichi and Cenedi in eye‑to‑eye confrontation and everyone on the plane but him and Jago in Ilisidi’s man’chi .

Ilisidi laid a hand on Cenedi’s arm. “We’ll go with them,” the dowager said.

Cenedi sketched a bow, then, and helped the aiji‑dowager to a seat, picking his way and hers over bodies the younger men were dragging out of the way.

“Don’t anybody step on my computer,” Bren said, holding his side. “There’s a bag somewhere… don’t step on it.”

“Find the paidhi’s bag,” Banichi told the men, and one of the men said, in perfect solemnity, “Nadi Banichi, there’s fourteen aboard. We’re supposed to be ten and two crew–”

“Up to ten and crew,” somebody else called out, and a third man, “Dead ones don’t count!”

On Mospheira, they’d be crazy.

“So how many are dead?” the argument went, and Cenedi shouted from up front, “The pilot’s leaving! He’s from Wigairiin, he wants to see to the household.”

“That’s one,” a man said.

“Let that one go,” Bren said hoarsely, with the back of his hand toward the one who’d said his arm was broken, the only grace they’d done him. They were tying up the living, stacking up the dead in the aisle. But Banichi said throw out a dead one instead.

So they dragged red‑and‑blue to the door and tossed him, and the live one, the one who’d resigned as their pilot, scrambled after him.

Banichi hit the door switch. The door started up. The engines whined louder, the brake still on.

Bren shut his eyes, remembering that height Ilisidi had said rose beside the runway. That snipers could stop a landing.

They could stop a takeoff, then, too.

The door had shut. Engine‑sound built and built. Cenedi let off the brakes and gunned it down the runway.

Banichi dropped into the seat next the window, splinted leg stiff. Bren gripped his seat arm, fit to rip the fabric, as rock whipped past the windows on one side, buildings on the other. Then blue‑white sky on the left, still rock on the right.

Sky on both sides, then, and the wheels coming up.

“Refuel, probably at Mogaru, then fly on to Shejidan,” Banichi said.

Then , then, he believed it.

XVI

« ^ »

H e hadn’t thought of Barb when he’d thought he was dying, and that was the bitter truth. Barb, in his mind and in his feelings, went off and on like a light switch… No, off was damned easy. On took a fantasy he flogged to desperate, dutiful life whenever the atevi world closed in on him or whenever he knew he was going back to Mospheira for a few days vacation.

‘Seeing Barb’ was an excuse to keep his family at arms’ length.

‘Seeing Barb,’ was the lie he told his mother when he just wanted to get up on to the mountain where his family wasn’t, and Barb wasn’t.

That was the truth, though he’d never added it up.

That was his life, his whole humanly‑speaking emotional life , such of it as wasn’t connected to his work, to Tabini and to the intellectual exercise of equivalencies, numbers, and tank baffles. He’d known, once, what to do and feel around human beings.

Only lately–he just wanted the mountain and the wind and the snow.

Lately he’d been happy with atevi, and successful with Tabini, and all of it had been a house of cards. The things he’d thought had made him the most successful of the paidhiin had blinded him to all the dangers. The people he’d thought he trusted…

Something rough and wet attacked his face, a strong hand tilted his head back, something roared in his ears, familiar sound. Didn’t know what, until he opened his eyes on blood‑stained white and felt the seat arm under his right hand.

The bloody towel went away. Jago’s dark face hovered over him. The engine drone kept going.

“Bren‑ji,” Jago said, and mopped at a spot under his nose. Jago made a face. “Cenedi calls you immensely brave. And very stupid.”

“Saved his damn–” Wasn’t a nice word in Ragi. He looked beside him, saw Banichi wasn’t there. “Skin.”

“Cenedi knows, nadi‑ji.” Another few blots at his face, which fairly well prevented conversation. Then Jago hung the towel over the seat‑back ahead of him, on the other side of the exit aisle, and sat down on his arm rest.

“You were mad at me,” he said.

“No,” Jago said, in Jago‑fashion.

“God.”

“What is ‘God?’ ” Jago asked.

Sometimes, with Jago, one didn’t even know where to begin.

“So you’re not mad at me.”

“Bren‑ji, you were being a fool. I would have gone with you. You would have been all right.”

“Banichi couldn’t!”

“True,” Jago said.

Anger. Confusion. Frustration, or pain. He wasn’t sure what got the better of him.

Jago reached out and wiped his cheek with her fingers. Business‑like. Saner than he was.

“Tears,” he said.

“What’s ‘tears’?”

“God.”

“‘God’ is ‘tears’?”

He had to laugh. And wiped his own eyes, with the heel of the hand that worked. “Among other elusive concepts, Jago‑ji.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sometimes I think I’ve failed. I don’t even know. I’m supposed to understand you. And most of the time I don’t know, nadi Jago. Is that failure?”

Jago blinked, that was all for a moment. Then:

“No.”

“I can’t make you understand me. How can I make others?”

“But I do understand, nadi Bren.”

“ What do you understand?” He was suddenly, irrationally desperate, and the jet was carrying him where he had no control, with a cargo of dead and wounded.

“That there is great good will in you, nadi Bren.” Jago reached out and wiped his face with her fingers, brushed back his hair. “Banichi and I won over ten others to go with you. All would have gone.–Are you all right, nadi Bren?”

His eyes filled. He couldn’t help it. Jago wiped his face repeatedly.

“I’m fine. Where’s my computer, Jago? Have you got it?”

“Yes,” Jago said. “It’s perfectly safe.”

“I need a communications patch. I’ve got the cord, if they brought my whole kit.”

“For what, Bren‑ji?”

“To talk to Mospheira,” he said, all at once fearing Jago and Banichi might not have the authority. “For Tabini, nadi. Please.”

“I’ll speak to Banichi,” she said.

They’d charged the computer for him. The bastards had done that much of a favor to the world at large. Jago had gotten him a blanket, so he wasn’t freezing. They’d passed the border and the two prisoners at the rear of the plane were in the restroom together with the door wedged shut, the electrical fuse pulled, and the guns of two of Ilisidi’s highly motivated guards trained on the door. Everybody declared they could wait until Moghara Airport.

Reboot, mode 3, m‑for‑mask, then depress, mode‑4, simultaneously, SAFE.

Fine, easy, if the left hand worked. He managed it with the right.

The prompt came up, with, in Mosphei’: Input date .

He typed, instead, in Mosphei’: To be or not to be .

System came up.

He let go a long breath and started typing, five‑fingered, calling up files, getting access and communications codes for Mospheira’s network, pasting them in as hidden characters that would trigger response‑exchanges between his computer and the Mospheira system.

The rebels, if they’d gotten into system level, could have flown a plane right through Mospheira’s defense line.

Could have brought down Mospheira’s whole network. Fouled up everything from the subway system to the earth station dish–unless Mospheira, being sane, had long since realized he was in trouble and changed those codes.

But that didn’t mean they were totally out of commission. They’d just get a different routing until he got clearance.

He hunted and pecked, key at a time, through the initial text.

Sorry I’ve been out of touch …

Banichi had been forward in the plane, standing up, talking to Ilisidi and one of her men, who was sitting at the front. Now he came down the aisle, leaning on seat‑backs, favoring the splinted ankle.

“Get off your feet, damn it!” Bren said, and muttered, politely, “Nadi.”

Banichi worked his way to the seat beside him, in the exit aisle, and fell into it with a profound sigh, his face beaded with sweat. But he didn’t look at all unhappy, for a man in excruciating pain.

“I just got hold of Tabini,” Banichi said. “He says he’s glad you’re all right, he had every confidence you’d settle the rebels single‑handed.”

He had to laugh. It hurt.

“He’s sending his private plane,” Banichi said. “We’re re‑routed to Alujisan. Longer runway. Cenedi’s doing fine, but he says he’s getting wobbly and he’s not sorry to have a relief coming up. We’ll hand the prisoners over to the local guard, board a nice clean plane and have someone feed us lunch. Meanwhile Tabini’s moving forces in by air as far as Bairi‑magi, three‑hour train ride from Maidingi, two hours from Fagioni and Wigairiin. Watch him offer amnesty next– if , he says, you can come up with a reason to tell the hasdrawad, about this ship, that can calm the situation. He wants you in the court. Tonight.”

“With an answer.” He no longer felt like laughing. “Banichi‑ji, atevi have all the rights with these strangers on the ship. We on Mospheira don’t. You know our presence in this solar system was an accident… but our landing wasn’t. We were passengers on that ship. The crew took the ship and left us here. They said they were going to locate a place to build. We weren’t damned happy about their leaving, and they weren’t happy about our threat to land here. Two hundred years may not have improved our relationship with these people.”

“Are they here to take you away?”

“That would make some atevi happy, wouldn’t it?”

“Not Tabini.”

Damned sure not Tabini. Not the pillar of the Western Association. That was why there were dead men on the plane with them: fear of humans was only part of it.

“There are considerable strains on the Association,” Banichi said somberly. “The conservative forces. The jealous. The ambitious. Five administrations have kept the peace, under the aijiin of Shejidan and the dictates of the paidhiin…”

“We don’t dictate.”

“The iron‑fisted suggestions of the paidhiin. Backed by a space station and technology we don’t dream of.”

“A space station that sweeps down from orbit and rains fire on provincial capitals at least once a month–we’ve had this conversation before, Banichi. I had it with Ilisidi’s men in the basement. I just had it, abbreviated version, with the gentlemen in the back of the plane, who broke my arm, thank you very much, nadi, but we don’t have any intention of taking over the planet this month.” He was raving, losing his threads. He leaned his head back against the seat. “You’re safe from them, Banichi. At least as far as them coming down here. They don’t like planets to live on. They want us to come up there and maintain their station for them, free of charge, so they can go wherever they like and we fix what breaks and supply their ship.”