Pretender

“Why?” That eternal question, but indignant, and backed this time by comprehension of the situation.

“Because people blame me, young sir, for advising your father to build a space program, and to send atevi into space at all. It is less going to space that is the question, but the modernization— does one know that word?”

“One knows it very well, nandi. My great-grandmother detests it.”

“Well, people think the paidhi’s job was to prevent modernization happening too fast for people’s good, and they blame me for a great many things that resulted from it.”

“Mani-ma says if you had not translated the space books we would have the ship-aijiin in charge and the aiji could throw rocks at them for all the good it could do.”

He was astonished. And gratified. It terrified him that he had fallen into a discussion of politics with an eight-year-old. But Cajeiri had just spent two years discussing politics with Ilisidi, and that why of his was an extremely loaded question.

The paidhi inclined his head in respect. “It may be true, young sir. I think it is. But many good and honest people only see the disturbance and the change in their neighborhoods. One would not say your father’s guards are bad men—unless they oppose you, young gentleman. In that case, one opposes them. And I may be completely wrong. They may be thoroughly honest men and in favor of you as your father’s son. But if you can catch your great-grandmother’s ear—in particular hers—be guided by her, not by me.”

For a moment those young eyes bored straight into him, his father’s very look—then a darted look aside at Cenedi, and back to him, dead-on. “Mani-ma says you are smarter than any other human, nandi, and I should pay close attention to you, except a few things. That one should understand why you say things.”

“One is flattered beyond all measure, young lord, by your great-grandmother’s good opinion. One hopes never to fail it.

Particularly in this. Be ever so careful, young sir. Rely on Cenedi.

Rely on him, and on your great-grandmother.”

It was a worried look. And a boy had confronted the edge of a political breach he was born to span.

“A Ragi father, a Malguri great-grandmother, an Atageini mother, young sir, along with an Ajuri great-grandfather and Kadagidi relatives with ties to the south coast—these are considerable advantages, once you reach your majority. Your heredity spans the whole continent, have you considered that? It is a great advantage for you someday, but it requires a certain patience at the moment. It requires living to be a man, and aiji in your father’s place. Cenedi is the one who will protect you.”

“Do I have to rely on the Ajuri? And my great-uncle?”

“One must not offend these relatives. Leave that to your great-grandmother.”

Golden eyes flickered—a swing between suspicion of humor and grim determination. From inside the door, a moment ago, the sharp crack of Ilisidi’s cane, a family fight in full spate.

“Cenedi-ji,” the boy said then, ever so quietly, and with a shift of his eyes past Bren’s shoulder, “is this good advice?”

“It is extremely good advice,” Cenedi said.

“Then I shall talk to my great-grandmother,” Cajeiri said. “Tell her so, Cenedi-ji.”

“Not in there, young sir,” Cenedi said, “but one will pass this word.”

“We should all go upstairs,” Jago said in a low voice, as a clot of other security passed them in the hall, not within earshot, one thought, but there were electronics, despite the hammering that echoed throughout, from two independent sources. “There are situations in progress, and one does not count this hallway secure.”

Never disregard staff’s warning. “Yes,” Bren said. He longed for the peace and quiet of his own quarters, removed from this gathering horde of strange guards and potentially deadly tension in the household. “Young sir, you may come up with us.”

“What shall we do up there?” The eight-year-old was immediately back in the ascendant, and strode along with them as they turned toward the stairs and climbed up to the next, the residential floor, catching a step as he tried to match Banichi. But no one answered the heir’s question in the echoing stairway, not past Ilisidi’s quarters and not past Cajeiri’s, where, presumably, Jegari’s sister Antaro was still watching the premises.

Banichi knocked at their own door, tested the handle, received some sort of signal, or gave one, via the pocket com, and opened the unlocked latch.

Algini sat at a small table near the window. He had a curious black box deployed and plugged into house circuits. He had not locked the door or secured the entry corridor against adventurous house staff on their proper and innocent business, but Algini was very much on alert, had a com-plug in one ear, and a pistol laid beside him on the little table.

Astonishing, Bren said to himelf. An operations center had materialized out of their luggage.

Banichi was not astonished. “Any news?” Banichi asked matter-of-factly, and Algini shrugged.

“Too much radio traffic for our safety,” Algini said. “The house itself no longer chatters freely, and we have our new guarded communications, besides the aiji’s staff and their network, but these newly arrived staffs are a liability. Every bus out there has a common-channel radio, and the citizens are by no means cautious in calling their relatives in the far reaches of the province.”

“The Kadagidi know by now there is a large component of common citizenry to this gathering,” Jago said, with a glance at Bren and at Cajeiri. “This is to our good, nandiin. They cannot press ahead with an attack and claim ignorance of the situation.”

“They will not attack, Jago-ji?” Cajeiri asked.

“One did not say so, young sir. But the Kadagidi will have to be much more cautious, not to proceed without finesse.”

“Finesse,” Cajeiri echoed.

“Indeed,” Jago said.

Assassins, Bren thought. The only way to get in a deft strike, and such a strike would aim at the house and the high-value targets.

Meanwhile Cajeiri had restrained himself from a look out the windows and instead sidled close to Algini’s black box device—had gained the sense not to reach out an inquisitive hand, but pointed at it. “Is it a com?”

“One might say so, young sir.” Algini flipped a switch and took out the earplug, with a look toward Bren. “Nandi.”

Offering his full attention, that was to say, and implying a question regarding their return to the room.

“It seems safer up here,” Bren said. “The aiji is having a family discussion downstairs. The plane is off and about to reconnoiter and Ajuri clan has come in, with its junior and senior members.”

A wry turn of Algini’s mouth. That situation needed little amplification.

“So what is funny?” Cajeiri asked.

“Very little, young sir.”

“The other installations?” Jago asked.

“Done,” Algini answered her. “Tano has been busy. One would recommend the young gentleman and his staff relocate to these premises or to the dowager’s for safety tonight.”

“My great-grandmother,” Cajeiri said with no hesitation. “We have to—” Talk to her was the probable next statement, but Jago cut that off with a sharp move and a finger uplifted to the ceiling, their code for possible listeners.

“Probably wise,” Bren said.

“So Jegari will bring Antaro here until then, shall he not, nand’ Bren?”

Pert. Entirely too pert, Ilisidi would say, but the boy was thinking, clearly.

“Excellent,” Bren said, and Jegari made a dart for the door.

“Halt!” From all his bodyguard at once. Jegari skidded to a stop and faced them, shock writ across his young face.

“Now the door is disarmed,” Algini said. “Make deliberate speed, young man, and inform your sister. And when you come back, knock. Always knock for admittance where Guild is involved and pray do not dart at doors. This is not Taiben Lodge.”

“Nadi.” A very chastened bow, and Jegari made a quieter departure from the premises.

“One assumes that vital instruction need not be repeated for others,” Bren said in a low voice, “young sir.”

“By no means, nand’ paidhi.” Oh, so quietly. Cajeiri’s eyes were wide and alert. Two reprimands in a handful of minutes, after his very adult response downstairs, and he was clearly off his balance.

“Come,” Jago said, “and one will instruct the young gentleman in other needful precautions.”

“Yes,” the lad said respectfully, and just then a distant hum obtruded, even to human ears. “The plane!” Cajeiri cried, and made one abortive move toward the window.

“Boy!” Banichi, in that tone, but Cajeiri had already frozen in midstep.

“I would not have touched—” Cajeiri began, and then the aircraft roared across the roof from east to west, distracting him.

“Keep your mind on business, young sir. Consider your staff, and restrain them from such moves. This is no game. This is never a game.”

“Yes, Banichi-nadi.” Meekly. Very softly. The plane buzzed in the distance, meanwhile, coming about for a landing, and Cajeiri did not even look toward that window to see.

“Excellent that you stopped,” Bren said, deciding such contrition deserved a little praise, ever so little, since a small dose was often overdose with this lad—but Banichi’s tone of voice would have chilled the dead. “House defenses are up, young gentleman, but more, defenses are up which you never saw used on the ship, things which might take a hand or a foot off. Jago will explain them for you and your staff, if you will attend her. In the meanwhile, one assumes the young gentleman from Dur is landing safely, if prematurely, and might have news for us. Tano-ji,” Tano had just come into the room, from the bath. “Will you inquire? And ask nand’ Rejiri to accept our hospitality in these premises immediately, if he cannot penetrate the family discussion below.”

“Nandi,” Tano said, and went off on his own errand, with— one hoped the boy noted the fact—a signaled coordination with his partner, who threw switches on a pocket remote.

“How shall I warn my bodyguard, nandi? Might I please go down the hall to advise them?”

Clearly thinking farther than himself and farther than the moment, now, twice in one half hour. And oh, so polite.

“Jago herself will go and advise them. It is an excellent idea, young sir, but security should handle security.”

The boy was getting the picture, and had a good head on his shoulders, which might ensure it lastingly stayed on his shoulders.

He stayed still, touching nothing, going nowhere, watching while Banichi did a walkaround tour of the windows and their precautions.

Meanwhile, switches had to be flicked off and reset again as Jago went out, then came back with Jegari, Antaro, and the all young company’s meager luggage—Jago settled that burden into the front cubby of a room—bringing with them, one noted, a bowl of seasonal fruit tucked into Antaro’s open carry-bag, a welcome little amenity which the forest bred youngsters did not leave behind in their transfer of residence.

The incoming luggage—saddlebags, in the case of the Taibeni youngsters—settled with their bags, the fruit bowl went onto the hall table, and the young trio followed Jago’s quick and thorough lecture, this time with embellishments from Cajeiri, who was a very quick study, in the dire things he had heard from Banichi.

There was, however, no Rejiri. The young man had not even entered the house to report, but had quickly gone off in a bus, so Tano said on his return from scouting. The contingent from Dur was about to reach the train station, the train coming in full bore, and they needed transport and guidance immediately— if not outright defense.

“The folk from the coast are coming in with Dur,” Tano reported, “by the same train, and with that group, notably, nandi, Adaran and Desigien.”

The fishing village where they had made their landing on the continent and the railhead village from which they had continued their journey, villages which had already risked a great deal in the dowager’s support.

“One should remember them,” Cajeiri said solemnly, with no one prompting.

“Indeed,” Bren said.

Two more contingents added to the vulnerable lot already sitting here, a target for Kadagidi mayhem as the sun declined in the sky.

Brave folk, as they had already proved. He was far from easy in his mind. Finesse, Jago had said. But there might be gunfire at the train station in very short order, and there might be ambush on the way—God knew where it would end up. Rejiri had apparently scouted things out, including, perhaps, the position of forces trying to control access to the Atageini train station, and then opted to ground the plane and go back by bus—a good move, Bren thought.

If he had appeared over Kadagidi forces, they might have claimed illicit attack, and that could escalate what was already in progress.

So while Jago instructed three eager youngsters in the meticulous details of avoiding disaster—and specifically cautioned them against trying to bypass Algini’s black box device, which involved skills the Guild did not divulge to novice security and an inquisitive princeling—Bren found no further use for himself at all, except to get out his computer and attempt to condense a report, paring thousands of pages down to essentials, in the hopes that if they did have a quiet night, and if Cajeiri did get his great-grandmother’s ear, Tabini might have time to look at it this evening.

No phone connnections to Mosphiera, not from this house. He had his modem, but without the landlines, it was no use to him; he mortally regretted that the communication network had never gotten beyond Mogari-nai’s solitary dish. He wondered how good the informal network was, the illicit radio traffic across the straits, whether that had maintained any mainland contacts, and consequently whether President Shawn Tyers knew what kind of a mess he was in, and that Tabini had knowingly put himself in a target zone? Yolanda Mercheson, his liaison with the spacefarers, was sitting over there on the island, in a hotel beside the landed shuttle, perhaps having been clever enough during his absence to have tried to create such links, but she had not made contact with him if they existed. At the moment, she was still waiting to relay information to the station, and he couldn’t tell her what was going on, either—though the increasingly massive traffic jam out there might by now be seen in orbit, who knew? The station had been on the verge of deploying observation satellites with very good optics, but that project, once certain hidebound humans and atevi had gotten wind of it, had bogged it down in security concerns on both mainland and island. Had it ever happened? One assumed if it had gotten into operation the captains up there would have given him suitable equipment, knowing the situation on the mainland. One assumed— Well, what the station knew or could see or gather from clandestine networks or doggedly determined spies in rowboats was not his problem, at the moment. Tabini was. Tabini’s gathering force was.

Tabini’s highly protective guard was.

“What has the dowager’s staff been able to tell Tabini’s guard?”

he asked Tano, as the one of his staff who at least looked unoccupied. “What success have you had passing information to them?”

But Tano answered: “Algini would know better, nandi,” and quietly replaced Algini in control of the black box, freeing Algini to come and confer with Bren.

“What information has Cenedi relayed to Tabini’s staff on our mission?” he asked, for starters. “And what are they saying?”

Algini hunkered down by his chair and, staring into space in the manner of a man recalling minute detail, spilled the essentials, an amazing flow, almost a chant.

And all coherently organized, more the marvel, carrying the agreements, the persons present at the negotiations, the representations made on both sides, exactly as he would have outlined it—though not the reassuring content he would have wished. The aiji’s guard had given no reaction to news that there were more foreigners out in space, and as to what the dowager had said to Tabini himself, only Tabini’s staff had witnessed that—and Tabini’s security staff was not talking to them.

After all these years, he was still amazed at the detail, the precise picture of who had been standing where and overheard what. He began, in some despair, to fold his computer away. The essentials had come out. Tabini had not wanted his report.

His movement interrupted the flow. Algini, rare gesture, touched his hand, preventing him. “Our accounts are necessarily missing some detail, nandi.”

“Clearly it misses very little,” he said, and decided to consult Algini, who rarely talked but who seemed communicative at the moment. “The aiji has men about him who seem commendably protective of him, Gini-ji. But Cenedi is not pleased. What would his former guard have said?”

“We are meeting obstacles in communication,” Algini said bluntly. “One cannot speak for the dead. But these men are different.”

“Their man’chi?”

“One detects very faint ties to the hills, and perhaps to the south.”

“To the south.” Alarming. “And the aiji has accepted that knowingly?”

“Certain of us question, Bren-nandi, how much the aiji knows of those ties.”

Twice alarming. “Who truly knows these men, Gini-ji?”

A very slight hesitation, half a breath, if that. Algini’s gold eyes flicked into rare direct contact at so blunt a question. “Various of us have formed independent impressions of the situation. Certainly the aiji and the consort have slept safely under their guard.”

“So their objective, whatever it may be, is consonant with the aiji recovering Shejidan.”

“One believes they do oppose Murini, and the aiji has continually been the strongest opposition available. Your return and the dowager’s have created somewhat of a stir: Your renewed influence challenges them.”

Clearer and clearer. “There is no likelihood this opinion of me will improve.”

“The paidhi and the dowager represent an arrangement of new numbers,” Algini said, “bringing in Lord Geigi and the establishment in space, as well as other coastal folk, who are now arriving here in considerable number to add their voice to the discussion.”

The coast and the hills had never been united before the aishidi’tat. There was still conflict of interest. The middle south and Lord Geigi, up on the station, had never been allies in policy except, again, as the aisihdi’tat united them.

“It would seem then,” he paraphrased the subtext, “that the elements of the aishidi’tat who are against the Kadagidi, but who have not been favorable to me or the dowager, have been the primary refuge of the aiji in this time of need, and they are greatly dismayed to see us returning easily and moving back into our former position, snatching away the influence they feel they have justly earned.”

Algini’s gaze flickered just slightly. “That would be one theory, nandi, and generously phrased.”

“Would they ultimately mean the aiji ill?”

“The elements we suspect have never favored the aishidi’tat’s establishment, and may use it now only as a convenience. To see all central organization fall apart would well suit some of the hill lords, and some of the south.”

“Disaster, in dealing with the ship-humans.”

“Your staff thinks so. The dowager thinks so. But the aiji’s staff is limiting what information reaches him.”

“Painting a picture in which their advice is wise and politically safer.”

“Exactly so, nandi. And the Ajuri themselves are seeking a position of more importance through their connections. They may be northerners, but they represent a certain discontent up to the north, a minority—they have been a minor force throughout, but the news that the aiji is here, again, under Lord Tatiseigi’s roof—and that you and the dowager are back—has galvanized them and filled their eyes with great expectations. They are a hinge-point, on which other borderline elements may base their reactions.”

“They thoroughly detest me.”

“The heir, their grandson, is a critical matter. They wish to see him with their own eyes, to establish his man’chi, where it lies and may lie in future. He departed as a child. He returns having been under your influence and the dowager’s for two formative years. He speaks fluent Mosphei’. This fact will shock them immeasureably.”

“His fondness for pizza and ice cream will not help us either,”

Bren said wryly, so great was his confidence in his staff that he had not questioned Algini discussing these things aloud with him, in this lowest of voices, but now his heart gave a thump and he remembered where they were. “Dare we say these things, Gini-ji?”

“One knows now exactly who is doing the monitoring and why,”

Algini said.“We have established ourselves. We have installations in several rooms. We are secure.”

The black box. The monitoring. And “installations.” God knew how installations had gotten into other rooms.

“Downstairs, too?”

Algini’s face became incredibly hard to read, and Bren broke off, assuming his staff’s secrets were not for him to penetrate.

“So must we approach the Ajuri in a conciliatory way?” he asked, and seemed to have startled Algini for once in their association. It was as if he had hit a nerve.

“One should not, by no means,” Algini said, “but rather trust that they will swing to the prevailing wind. They are not a ruling clan.

They have not the heredity. Yet.”

“They need Cajeiri.”

“They need his good will,” Algini said, “if they have any hope of prominence. They are ours because it is not in their interest the heir should perish.”

Cajeiri being their only claim to power and prominence.

Politics made strange bedfellows indeed. And Tatiseigi let the Ajuri under his roof and into his hospitality when other, higher ranking claimants to that hospitality were likely to sleep on bare ground or in their buses tonight. The Ajuri lord had certainly been caught off guard, meeting him and Cajeiri on the steps, as if they were there solely to confront him and prevent him reaching that goal. The old man had not recognized the heir, in his borrowed coat, but he had certainly recognized and affronted the paidhi—only to be set straight by an eight-year-old. Ajuri had been thoroughly discommoded, and hit Tatiseigi’s hall not in smooth advance, but in a fit of embarrassed outrage.

A delicious moment, if he had had the hand in planning it that the Ajuri must have thought he hadc no wonder the old lord had been put out with him, and now thought him more cunning than he was.

“Interesting,” he said. The member of his staff that had been sitting here at a table all afternoon proved to be a fount of information on everything in the house, while Banichi and Jago had been busy keeping him safe and Tano had been back and forth in the room, running clandestine errands, one had a slight suspicion, on the backstairs servants’ routes and wherever else he could reach within the secret ways of the building. Unlike Banichi and Jago, who had gone to deep space with him, Tano and Algini had spent the last two years at the station, hearing all the reports of disaster from the world below their feet, developing their own picture of politics as all order fell apart. Trust Algini to have a very good grasp of where lines of power ran.

“Interesting indeed, the position the Ajuri now find themselves in,” Algini said, “and their staff is making very cautious approaches to Tatiseigi’s and to the dowager’s staff.”

“To the dowager’s?”

“She is respected,” Algini said, which was no secret from anyone, “and feared. You are the unadded sum in many equations, nandi.

We have received approaches from out on the lawn. So has Lord Keimi of the Taibeni, at no few points. Now that you and the dowager are back in the numbers, there is some feeling of familiarity in the structure of the world, as certain people see it.

This restores a sort of balance of tensions which some find comfortable.”

“One can see that,” he murmured. Certain ones might oppose him, but he was a known quantity. “The heir, however, is a new quantity.”

“Indeed,” Algini said, “and he is young, nandi. Youth is always a cipher, when it comes to what his influence may become. You are the fixed point. No one believes you will break man’chi.”

“I?”

“You will not leave the aiji,” Algini said.

“Or the heir,” he said. “Or the dowager.”

Algini nodded. “A point of certainty. You are stability in these matters. More than the dowager herself, you represent a simple, sure number in all calculations. This reassures even your enemies, nandi.”

He was startled into a grim, soft laugh. “One is glad to perform a service.”

“A vital service, at a time when the aiji has issued a call.”

His heart sped. “Has he, Gini-ji?”

“As of this morning,” Algini said. “But certain people were already coming.”

“The Kadagidi have issued a call, on their side.”

“Momentum. Momentum and the will of the people. One wonders where the summons will bring a muster.”

“Well,” Bren said, “I shall not leave him, and he will not leave the people out there, and you for some reason a human can never understand will not leave me, so here we sit, one supposes, until the sun goes down, deeply appreciative of your analysis, Gini-ji, ever so appreciative.”

“Salads,” Algini said.

He had to laugh. He had to laugh aloud, touched to the heart.

“Extraordinary salads, Gini-ji.”

Algini was a grim fellow. But he smiled, all the same. “Aiji-ma,”

he said, not nandi. Not nand’ paidhi, not even Bren-ji. And one could hardly believe one had just heard that word. He supposed he stared at Algini for a second.

“Nand’ Bren.” Cajeiri bumped the other side of his chair. “Antaro says she and Jegari can go downstairs and get us food for tonight, if we are not going to great-uncle’s dinner. They will ask,” he added, as if to dispel any notion of theft.

“One might accompany the youngsters,” Algini said wryly, “and lay hands on a bottle of brandy.”

As if he and Cajeiri had not eaten their fill of teacakes. But in all the arrangements for getting staff fed, staff had had much more opportunity to drop belowstairs and take advantage of the offerings.

If there was a buffet laid out, the two Taibeni youngsters, otherwise without useful employment, might carry a basket up here in reasonable safety. “Go with them, Gini-ji. But not,” he added, and got only that far before Cajeiri dropped crosslegged onto the floor at his side.

“Not me,” Cajeiri said glumly. “Never me.”

4

The sun sank. It grew dark out, or dark in that last stage of twilight. A human eye might take it for full night. Not an atevi eye.

And the hammering went on downstairs, incessant, which argued either workmen driven by Lord Tatiseigi’s fraying temper (unimproved by the family discussion, one might guess) or workmen on a project on which security depended. Presumably dinner was in the offing down there.

Jegari and Antaro, with Algini, missing for the better part of an hour, attended Adaro and Timani up from downstairs, a party loaded with paper-wrapped packets and baskets redolent of savory meats—and clinking with bottles far in excess of the promised brandy.

“Ah,” Banichi said, diverted from his small wiring project. Bren would have sworn he could have no appetite of his own after all that sugar and tea, but his appetite perked up at that wonderful smell.

“The lords have gone to supper, nand’ Bren,” Algini reported.

“And it seems at least that all parties have gone to the dining hall.

The argument beforehand was loud, but they are all at the same table.”

Encouraging, at least. And the kitchens, whether with Adaro’s and Timani’s urging, or because they had cooked up a precautionary surplus of food, had provided them a very handsome supper, which one had to trust.

Adaro and Timani began to search for a serving surface, the apartment not being provided with a dining table. The computer table was obliged to serve that purpose, and several chairs besides, holding the various dishes. The informal arrangement left only the bed and the floor for sitting, but there were glasses and utensils enough, and bottles of ice water as well as wine and the fine brandy.

The servants served while the household sat cross-legged on the floor, Cajeiri as well, lord and bodyguard and servants all safely below the level of the windows as night came down, as they appreciated the first morsels of a grand dinner which Algini had assured them had come from the same dishes which served the whole household—and Banichi and Jago instructed the sober Taibeni young folk in the subtle arts of assassination the while, while pointing out some of the features of the black box, and some delicacies of the art of poison. It was to be noted that Algini had a com-plug in his ear since he had come back; affairs in the kitchens were not all he had been arranging.

“Poisoning rarely happens in a well-managed kitchen,” Jago said cheerfully, “and this kitchen, whatever the failings of the electronics in the house, does not allow people to wander through at liberty. The cook manages the pantry under lock and key, and only allows observation, not touching. If one wishes food, one obtains it from the table outside.”

“Could you not break in, Banichi-ji?” Cajeiri asked, appealing to the greatest authority in his young experience.

“Probably,” Banichi said in some amusement, which gave Bren a certain niggling doubt about the bite currently in his mouth, but, hell, he said to himself, in a household which had just purged itself of all the Kadagidi spies it knew about, likely if there was one topflight man in all Tatiseigi’s household, it was the cook, seeing that Tatiseigi was still alive despite his long-standing feuds and the onetime presence of Murini under this roof. The cook of a stately home was up on food safety— in all its senses. Witness Bindanda, his own cook and staffer back on station—who was incidentally connected with Tatiseigi’s household. There was a man who managed his kitchen with great skill.

A little polite laughter, and the servants offered the next course.

Downstairs, the hammering stopped. Abruptly.

Everyone in their little circle stopped eating and cast bemused looks into the ether, and then toward each other.

Someone of note from the camp might have walked in past the workmen. Possibly Rejiri had just arrived with a sizeable delegation.

Or not.

“Did we hear a vehicle engine?” His staff’s ears were far keener than his.

“Yes,” Banichi said. “Not the first such, but a moment ago, yes.”

“Guild,” Algini said. He still had the com device in his ear, and suddenly had an intent, distant look. “A Guild delegation has arrived.”

News of it had just reached Algini’s downstairs contact.

“It has come, then,” Banichi said solemnly.

Bren swallowed the last of the bite he had in his mouth and looked at Banichi, who was looking at Jago as if they both understood something and then at Tano. As if everyone in the universe would understand, if they had any wit at all.

“From Shejidan?” he was obliged to ask the stupid but necessary question.

“They are expected,” Algini said, dinner forgotten as he followed the information flowing into his ear from presumably secure systems. Or Tatiseigi’s compromised ones.

But withholding the knowledge of Guild official presence would not be in their interest. The Kadagidi would hardly attack with Guild officials in the house. All sense of that seemed off.

“Perhaps the Guildmaster received my letter,” Bren said quietly, hopefully, while Cajeiri positively had his lip bitten in his teeth, restraining questions. His eyes were taking in everything.

“Perhaps he has,” Banichi said.

Bren moved his napkin from his lap. “I should go downstairs.”

Cajeiri moved to rise as he did, oversetting a water glass, which Jago’s lightning reflexes rescued as the boy scrambled for his feet.

His bodyguard jumped up with him.

“At this moment,” Bren said, “my company is not the most auspicious for your own introduction to the Guild, young sir. First impressions are difficult to overcome.”

The jaw halfway set. But there was a sensible worry on that brow, too. “So the Guild is the paidhi’s enemy, like my greatgrandfather?”

“Now, you must not speak ill of your Ajuri relations or the Guild either, young sir.”

“You rescued the kyo! You saved all the humans! You brought us home!”

“That we did, young sir, but we have to have their confidence to tell them those things.”

“Then they are fools!” Cajeiri said. “And if they can speak to my father, so can I.”

Dared one say the paidhi felt control of the situation slipping though his fingers? It was not only history and diction the boy had learned from his great-grandmother.

“Patience, patience,” he said. “Reconnoiter. Has Banichi taught you that word?”

“Cenedi did. We are quite cognizant of the word.”

“One very much advises meekness and modesty in front of the Guild,” Bren said, hoping to nip that pert attitude in the bud.

“Leave policy to your father and do not limit his resources by presenting him with a difficult situation.”

A deep sigh. “I am not aiji yet.” Clearly another Ilisidi quote. “But one will not permit them to lie. Timani and Adaro are my mother’s servants. And they can tell her things.”

That can tell was a drop of caution in a burgeoning sea of regal indignation: Cajeiri had not blurted everything out, not about the problem with Tabini’s guards; he had not taken his usual tack and made things irrevocable—a breathtaking prudence, when one considered what damning things the boy could blurt out.

“One doubts they will have time to do so, young sir, nor may they wish to be put in that position. But you are not aiji. Nor will you ever be, nor perhaps will your father be by morning, if this encounter with the Guild goes wrong. Caution and prudence, one begs you. Information is life, here.” Timani, whose ears were doubtless burning, was utterly deadpan through this—he had brought a change of coats, a considerable finery that had likely been cloth on a bolt as late as this afternoon, and stood with it in his hands, distressed. “Thank you, nadi,” Bren said, and put one arm in, then the other, while Cajeiri stood silent and brimming over with things bubbling up inside him.

The coat was deepest purple shading to red in a serpentine, shining brocade, a finer coat than the lace on his shirt could possibly do justice, and he could only wonder how the servants had put this together in a handful of hours, or whether Tatiseigi might recognize the fabric as not a very petty theft.

“Extraordinary,” he murmured, by way of appreciation as Timani brushed down the sleeves.

“It fits, nandi?”

“Very well, nadi.” With a little adjustment of the cuffs, while the maidservant, Adaro, adjusted his queue past the collar. “Excellent.”

He was shaken by the boy’s little outburst, knowing what a desperate pass they had come to down there, and how he was going to have to defy Tabini’s dismissal, at least to appear in the vicinity.

But he felt, at least, the equal of any lord down there, as flashy, in this mode, as Tabini was deliberately martial. The aiji was completely out of the fashion wars that meant psychological advantage, and remarkable in the statement he did make—but for his part, no ateva wanted to give way in argument to a peer who looked like a rag-bin. It was core of the court mentality. It was like a suit of armor, this purple-red coat.

He drew in a deep breath. “And the young gentleman?” he asked Timani.

“Mani-ma has my best clothes in her closet, nand’ paidhi,” Cajeiri said, unasked. One saw the boy was upset, that rash behavior was very near the surface and wanted calming.

“Then we had better find them, had we not, and get you down to your great-grandmother?”

Pointed remark. Cajeiri’s pupils widened, a little jolt of comprehension that this was a very adult game from which he was not excluded.

“Nandi.” From Algini, a sober look.

“Is there a difficulty?” he asked.

“One has heard a name,” Algini said, with reference to that com device in his ear. “Gegini.”

Jago shot Banichi a look, a decided look.

“Who is he?” Bren asked, and Banichi, with a glance at Algini and back, grimaced. “One can hardly name names,” Banichi said, “but if the Guild has moved from neutrality, clearly this visitation is not one according to your wishes, Bren-ji, or in response to your letter.”

That was three times around the same comer and no direct information. “Are you saying this arrival could be a Kadagidi expedition, brazening it into the house? A lie, nadiin-ji?”

“Oh, they would be official, at highest level, under Guild seal,”

Banichi said.

“The question is, always,” Algini said, “what is the state of affairs within the Guild, and does Gegini have a right to that seal?”

“Would this be notice of a Filing, do you think?”

“Or outright illegal conduct,” Algini said. “Such action is a possibility, Bren-ji. This is not a man the Guildmaster we know would send. We are by no means sure the Guildmaster we know is alive. This man is acting and speaking as if he were Guildmaster.”

Looks passed among his security. Timani and Adaro had left or, one thought, that name Algini had named and the details Algini referred to might never have come out; the name itself, Gegini, meant nothing to his ears, except it was a name not that uncommon in the Padi Valley.

A new power within the Assassins’ Guild, someone his staff knew, and did not favor? Someone Tano and Algini had been tracking in their absence from the world?

The Guild, in new hands?

He had been accustomed to thinking of that Guild above all others as unassailable in its integrity and unmatched in its outright power. It operated inside every great house on the continent, though its individual members had man’chi to the houses and their lords.

But with power over half the civilized world at issue, clearly anything could change if the side favoring Murini had quietly slipped poison into a teacup. His staff, hedging the secrecy of their own Guild, was giving him strong hints about an entity his space-based staff particularly knew from the inside, in all its hidden partsc a name, moreover, that meant something to Banichi and Jago.

“Maybe you should not go down there at all, young gentleman,”

Bren said directly to Cajeiri, and saw the boy go from wide-eyed absorption of the situation, and a little confusion, to jut-lipped disapproval of the order in a heartbeat. “In the sense that you should preserve a politic distance from me and my doings, young sir, perhaps you should not be here, either.”

“Then I should be sitting with mani-ma downstairs,” Cajeiri said, “and she will not tolerate bad behavior. My bodyguard can escort me down by myself. And no one will stop me at the door.”

All eyes turned to the paidhi for the ultimate decision in this political arena. And the best advice seemed to come from the eight-year-old.

At least moving Cajeiri downstairs while his staff moved his baggage back to Ilisidi’s suite would put him under Cenedi’s protection, not to mention Ilisidi’s, leaving no trace of the boy’s evening sojourn here. Ilisidi in particular was, it always had to be reckoned, an easterner, from that most tenuously attached half of the aishidi’tat, and the eastern half of the continent was a force that had to be reckoned with cautiously—very cautiously. In any general upheaval, Ilisidi stood a real chance of being among the few left standing, if her staff could move quickly enough.

“Never mind your coat, young sir. Take mine. Go.”

“But—”

“I shall manage, young sir.” He shed it, and with his own hands held it out for the boy.

The purple coat was a fair fit, even if Cajeiri was growing broader in the shoulders. Bren took Cajeiri’s plain day-wear in its place, a fine coat, nonetheless, a pale green brocade that just happened to be in the Atageini shade, while the purple and red was very well in color key with the Ragi colors: It was dark, it was dramatic, and if the seams held up, it lent a handsome boy an extremely princely look in a time of crisis and threat.

He straightened Cajeiri’s collar himself, the servant’s role, and looked the boy squarely in the eyes as he did so. “Be canny. Judge the room ever so carefully before you walk in. If Cenedi or Nawari is not at the door, or if things look wrong, come back up the stairs immediately. If things go very wrong down there, and you have to get away, figure to get outside and get back to the window here or upstairs to our door—do not use the servant passages if that has to be the choice: They will surely guard them first. But do not forget the knock. Do not for a moment forget the knock. Do you understand me clearly, young sir?”

“One understands, nand’ paidhi.” Cajeiri was entirely sober and attentive, young eyes wide and, for the first time, truly frightened.

“If you have to run outdoors,” Jago said, “remember there will be other Guild with night-scopes. They can see you in the dark.”

“If you must escape, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, “escape outside. Never mind the baggage. We will stay by you and the young gentleman.”

If things went wrong down there, getting the heir away became a goal worth any risk, any sacrifice, not just for the continuity of Ragi rule on the continent, but for the stability of government that had to deal with the kyo when they arrived— everything hung on either Tabini or his son surviving. “You have no other job, if things go badly, young sir, except to use your head and to get yourself to safety. That is how you help your staff, by helping them help you.

Go. Quickly now.”

The boy cast a look at his own young staff and headed for the door.

And stopped, with a scared look back.

“Defenses are down now,” Tano said. “Go.”

A quick study. Bren never doubted that. It was why he placed his hopes in the boy.

And if the boy came running hellbent back up here, with Cenedi not where he was supposed to be—all of them might have to take the window route.

“The Guild will have made more than one approach to the house,”

Banichi said. “There will be the delegation, and observers that we will not see, Jago is quite right. They will likely have been here before the delegation. And possibly within the house.”

“As simply so as contacting an amenable Guild agent on a given staff,” Jago added, leading one to wonder, not for the first time during the years he had dealt with these particular Guild members, if there were agents who worked directly for the Guild planted in key houses throughout the aishidi’tat.

He didn’t ask. He had become privy to enough Guild secrets as it was, information that didn’t make him confident of their situation at the moment. If, as Banichi hinted, the Guild had just become a player in this game, if the old Guildmaster had gone down, and if rules were all suspended, then what the Guild could do was extensive, and extreme, and bloody.

And not on their side. Not even neutral any longer. They could be walking down there to hear a Filing against Tabini. And if that was the case, they had to listen and let these people walk out safely.

Deep breath. He straightened his own queue, which had gotten crushed under his collar. He was, he decided, as dressed as he could get. “Time for us to go,” he said, and cast a look at Jago, at Banichi, then at Tano and Algini. “The boy,” he said, “nadiin, should anything happen that seems to require it, any one of you take him somewhere, and the rest of us do not ask to know where that would be. We will find one another.”

“Yes,” Tano said, agreeing to back up Algini, that partnership working together, and that was that, as Bren headed out the door with Banichi and Jago.

Out into an otherwise quiet hallway. The boy had gone downstairs, and at least there was no uproar from below. Bren walked calmly, quietly toward the stairs, with Banichi and Jago, one on each side of him—walked toward what he had asked for, in one sense, with his letter to the Guild—but he very much doubted now that it was what had brought this mission to Tirnamardi.

He took his cue from Banichi and Jago and kept his brain entirely in present tense, in the moment, his eyes scanning recesses and alert to any move. He had one fleeting inner imagination of the Guild officers, inbound, diverting attention with a small dispute at the front door while a different, more stealthy approach came up through the scattered camps— everyone out there, however nervous, would tend to assume that a stranger walking through their camp was just some stranger from an allied village or that an inbound bus weaving its way across the lawn was part of the Dur contingent, never mind that it unloaded heavy weapons among its baggage.

Was he scared at that moment? Oh, not half.

Down the steps next to the foyer, where the workmen who had been hammering away at the doors stood idle amid lumber and their scaffolding, looking confused and doubtful as to whether they ought to take up their work again.

“Have you seen strangers from the Guild, nadiin?” Banichi asked them.

Several hands pointed silently and solemnly toward the drawing room. Bodyguards were no longer in evidence at the door. They had all drawn into the room, it seemed, indicating a prudent move to protect the lords who held their man’chi not from some external threat, this time, but from the high officers of the Guild itself, and some shift in policy that immediately concerned them.

“Come in with me,” Bren said, “nadiin-ji.”

He started to touch the door, hesitated, just that heartbeat of doubt, but Banichi and Jago, who were wired and doubtless reading those devices and signals they had not used in two years, simultaneously put out hands and opened both the double doors.

It was a dramatic, two-door entrance, to be sure. Every eye turned. The weapon hand of every bodyguard in the room moved.

And stayed and relaxed, as they recognized him.

Cajeiri had gotten a seat next to his mother. New arrivals stood in the middle of the half arc of chairs, men and women in Guild black and silver, a grim, tall old man who did not look at him, and his two bodyguards, whose gold eyes locked on the intrusion for one paralytic moment. Smooth as a well-oiled machine and deadly: The older Guild, rarely seen, was like that.

“Nandi,” Bren said, as the old man slowly swung a look toward him and as one of the old man’s guard looked, machinelike, toward the assembled lords. That was the address appropriate for a newly arrived Guild official, and Bren gave a careful, measured bow to the old man.

“Paidhi-aiji,” Tabini said. “Come sit.”

That shocked him. Scared him, in fact. Tabini made a point, made a defiant statement in that invitation, in fact, in a morass of political quicksand, and with his guard behind him and these Guild strangers in front. Bren felt his heart skip, covered his shock as smoothly as he could, and went to sit where Tabini pointed, as servants managed to insert a chair between Tabini and the dowager.

Don’t do this, he would have fervently advised Tabini. Don’t make statements that you might have to deny before sunrise. But one did not hesitate at the aiji’s order, not when it was so deliberately, so knowingly given.

Cajeiri, he noted, kept a stone face to the whole proceedings. The boy’s chair was on his mother’s left, between her and the Ajuri, and Cajeiri’s two young guards stood behind his chair as if they were Guild—if there was anyone in the room whose position was less enviable than the paidhi-aiji’s, it had to be those two brave youngsters, facing senior Guild who would take a dim view of anyone intruding on Guild prerogatives.

Bren sat. He did not turn his head to see, but a faint sound declared Banichi and Jago were taking their positions behind his chair.

A minor disruption. “We have begun inquiry into the Ragi clan request,” the old Guildsman resumed his statement. “We have come here to gather evidence.”

“One comes damned late, nandi.” From Tabini. And in no conciliatory tone. “Honest members of your own guild are dead in this delay.”

“We are here at the right time,” the old man said in a soft voice, and his golden eyes shifted subtly until they stared straight at Bren, cold and terrible. That gaze went on to Ilisidi, and last of all to Tatiseigi, on Ilisidi’s far side. “You have called Council, nandi,”

the old man said at last, directly to Tatiseigi. “You claim a complaint against a neighboring clan. You have appealed to the Guild. We are here.”

“I have a justified complaint!” Tatiseigi said, rising with more alacrity than the old gentleman usually managed. “Damage to these premises, a national treasure. Kadagidi have attacked non-Guild on our land, when we have done them no injury at all!

You have seen the ruin of our foyer!”

“The Kadagidi likewise have a complaint against the Atageini,”

the Guildsman said, “in your fomenting rebellion and dissent against the aiji who now sits in Shejidan.”

“They dare say so!” Tatiseigi fairly frothed at the mouth. “There was absolutely no cause for this assault, less for the damage to a historic house! We were at no time involved in any political cause, nor has our clan!”

“You host the former aiji. This is provocative.”

“Think twice,” Tabini said ominously. “Murini does not exist.

And we visit this house in the name of the aishidi’tat, which is not dissolved, and which does not release the Guild from its contract.

Show me any signing to the contrary.”

The Guildsman’s mouth opened, his brows contracted, and then, perhaps, perhaps—what he would have said failed to find exit. “We do not carry such papers about. And the Ragi lord’s claim to Sheijidan has been judged by the citizenry of Shejidan, judged and dismissed.”

“We have no need for debate,” Tabini said. “But while this house keeps records, we will state our position. Kadagidi have attacked my underage son, tried to visit murder on this house, of another clan, and we intervened while the Guild sat paralyzed and debating in Shejidan over decrees from a Kadagidi who has no authority, no man’chi, and lacks the mandate.”

“He has the mandate,” the answer snapped back.

“He has called the legislature. Have they assembled?”

The Ajuri’s information. Tabini committed them all on a dice roll.

And Guild silence met that question, for at least three heartbeats.

“Equal evidence exists on either side,” the Guildsman said, lines deepening around his mouth. “No one will move from current positions tonight. No attack, no retreat. We are here officially to make Guild judgment, in response to a request from the Atageini lord, and we demand lodgings.” This, swinging his gaze from Tabini to Tatiseigi. “This is a demand, nand’ Tatiseigi.”

“You are our guests,” Tatiseigi said, not happily, and waved a hand at the desperate servant staff, namely the major domo standing by the inner door. “The green suite,” he said.

The old major domo came close and bent down to his lord’s ear to whisper a protest, but he managed perhaps two words before Tatiseigi cut him off with, “The Ajuri will still take the east.” In a furious not-quite-whisper, and with a wave of his hand at a second, anguished protest. “Move my grandson somewhere, beneficent gods!

He is a minor child!”

It was an ungraceful moment; it embarrassed the old lord, who was not coping well with the situation. The displacement was a family embarrassment, the Ajuri were already unhappy, but perhaps not so unhappy as Ilisidi, and the Guild was not a comfortable neighbor to anyone.

“They may have my room, great-uncle,” Cajeiri said in his high, distinctive voice, “since I am moving in with great-grandmother.”

“He is perfectly welcome,” Ilisidi said frostily, “since this visitor is so arrogant as to make demands the aiji of Shejidan himself would scruple to make on a historic and damaged house. He has interrupted our supper with his demands, he has tracked sawdust on the floor, he has been inconvenient, inconsiderate and late! He brings no documentation, he begins his investigations in the dark of night, and he disrespects his hostc”

That alone, echoing in the lofty ceiling, accompanied by the sharp crack of Ilisidi’s cane for emphasis, created a stir in the room, and at that very moment, piling confusion dangerously atop disorganization, an entirely new party arrived through the double doors, escorted in by a handful of Taibeni rangers and a cluster of young men in an unlikely mix of worn hunting gear and lordly dress and casuals.

The center of the arriving commotion, hurried along by this unlikely guard, was a frail and elderly gentleman, his queue half undone and his white hair wisping about his beaming face.

Grigiji, Astronomer Emeritus, blithely ignored the glowering Guild, ignored Tabini-aiji as if he had seen him not half an hour ago, and his face lit in thorough, undisguised, childlike delight as his eyes discovered Bren and the dowager.

“Ah, dowager-ji! One was absolutely sure you would be here! We saw the ship from the little telescope. My students informed me, we informed the aiji, of course—” A little bow toward Tabini. “And we came here as fast as we could. How was the voyage? Have you brought data for us?”

Bren rose desperately in a hall not his own, and gave a little bow, trying to manage the situation with this good old man before Guild indignation unraveled everything. “The dowager has brought back the most astounding things, nand’ Astronomer.” No lie at all, but with that lure, he had gained the Astronomer Emeritus’ absolute attention, and was aware simultaneously the hostile Guild was hearing all of it—not with the same delight that shone in the old court Astronomer’s face, and possibly to very different political effect. He aggressively expanded on his statement. “We have documents. The mission was an unqualified success. The danger to the aishidi’tat is much abated—but grown complex.”

“Indeed,” Ilisidi said.

The Guild, meanwhile, stood clearly upstaged in its own moment.

“A chair for the Astronomer,” Tatiseigi said meaningfully, but in vain, as Grigiji moved to pay a bow to Ilisidi, to exchange a few pleasantries, and only then meandered on to Tabini and Damiri, all as if he were at some social gathering— and knowing Grigiji, one could think perhaps that great and childlike mind had quite missed the significance of the Guild presence: They weren’t people he knew, and Bren held his breath for fear the old man would wander on and introduce himself to them. The Guild for its part was thoroughly insulted, no doubt of it, and they glowered at the major domo who had let the Astronomer in, and who attempted, in the small lull, to inform the Guildsmen where they might lodge.

The Guild senior muttered something ungracious. Then in a voice that suddenly carried over all the chaos: “We are here to observe, and what we observe we will take into account, nandiin. Where we wish information, we will ask it. We may and we may not proceed to formal hearing on your question.”

With which the Guildsmen turned and walked out, a black clot of ill will, in a silence still quivering with those deep tones.

The doors shut, hard, with no one to manage them.

“Well,” said Grigiji, “well.” With those perpetually astonished eyes. He was out of breath, windblown, so frail-looking his physical body seemed faded. The life that was in him burned through, all the same, like a star through the fear the Guild had brought in, while his students dispersed about the peripheries of the hall as his bodyguard. These youths, of various social classes, in various shades of dust and informality of dress, mingled with frowning Guildsmen all about the hall. Grigiji’s bodyguard: His students, a motley group of gangling collegiates, but far more martial were his second escort of graceful, silent Taibeni, with their personal armament of hunting rifles and knives. “Those gentlemen seem rather out of countenance, do they not?”

“One doubts,” Tabini said dryly, “that they depart more disturbed than they arrived.”

“Ha,” Ilisidi said, leaning on her cane. “Very welcome termination of that sorry display. Bravely done, Gri-ji.”

“Very dangerously done,” Lord Tatiseigi muttered. “And under my roof!”

“Pish! Wisely handled, Tati-ji, wisely and deftly managed. Nand’ Bren, very deftly done.”

“Nand’ dowager.” Bren managed a bow and sank back into his chair, wishing he were back upstairs, and far from confident he had been at all wise to drop that information into the pool.

“But where are these records you name?” the Astronomer asked.

“Might we see them?”

“In due time, nand’ Astronomer,” Tabini said, getting to his feet.

“A staff meeting may be in order at this point, to bring everyone up to the moment. Will any of your young gentlemen choose to attend, nand’ Astronomer?”

Staff meeting. Almost universally Guild staff, that was the irony—a meeting regarding the deadly presence that had entered their midst, with events and perhaps other Assassins subtly percolating through the countryside, all aiming here, at Tabini. And new information in the mix: the non-appearance of legislators summoned to the capital, the claim of these three Guild officers to an authority the validity of which no outsider to their Guild had the means to determine. The whole business had the ominous tension of a landslide just on the verge, and at least the Astronomer’s students, not being as unworldly as the Astronomer, all looked worried at their inclusion in that suggestion.

“Aiji-ma,” the senior of that lot said, bowing his head, while Kadiyi of Ajuri clan moved close for a word with his niece, Damiri casting up a worried, frowning glance at that whispering.

Bren sucked in a deep breath and cast a look to his own right, where Banichi loomed; not a word had he had from Banichi or Jago, although he was sure they had observations.

The Atageini and the aiji’s guard had fortified a line out there with buses and trucks and farmers with hunting rifles but clearly that wasn’t how the greatest threat had come to them. It had come up as three men at their door, answering a letter, and demanding to spend the night under their roof, right in the heart of their defenses.

And they still weren’t that sure of the men around Tabini.

“Are we to have supper at all?” the older Ajuri lord asked petulantly, amid all this. “Are we finally to be served the rest of our supper at some time this evening, respecting the noble efforts of your poor cook, nandi?”

The very thought of food turned Bren’s stomach.

But on the other hand having dinner was a practical notion. It fortified them against the night. It flew the banner of the completely ordinary in the face of that arrogant intrusion. It gave staffs time to confer without lordly interference. Tatiseigi, appearing quite glad to have the distraction from present dangers, gathered himself up and said yes, they should resume their dinner, and in short order, too—the new arrivals were to have a cold supper sent to their quarters.

By Tatiseigi’s tone, one had the feeling the supper offering might not be much beyond bread and cold sausages—a gesture of hospitality only, since even the paidhi could guess that the Guild on a mission would be very little likely to trust the house cuisine. One decidedly didn’t want them near the kitchens, the other alternative, letting them observe down there.

No. Not at all a good idea, Bren thought. One wanted those three shut in their quarters, not stirring out, and one very much doubted they remotely had that intentionc except to the degree they had agents slipping about in the bushes, while their officers diverted attention to themselves.

It seemed, in that light, a good moment for the paidhi, excluded from the dinner invitation, to retreat and consult. Bren got up quietly and slipped to the doorward side of the room, Banichi and Jago with him. They opened the door. He turned, bowed—no one showed interest—and left, entrusting Cajeiri to his great-grandmother and Tabini to his own devices.

“Come,” Jago said quietly once that door was shut and they stood outside, amid a very small scattering of other Guild. “We should go back upstairs, nandi, where we have some control over the perimeter.”

The operationally dual we, with the -ta, the numerical compensator, as if she were going with him, but as if Banichi were not.

Staff meeting, Tabini had said, but Bren had a terrible suspicion, given the businesslike frown on Jago’s face, that what happened next could be far more active than a debate. People could die, right in the meeting, by way of a vote. And he had no doubt at all there were Guild out on the grounds, if not already inside the house. They might have begun to lose this battle without most of the house knowing they were in it.

But what could he say, out here in front of witnesses? “Yes,” he said, and to Banichi, with a lingering look, “Take utmost care, Banichi-ji.”

“Always,” Banichi said smoothly, and Jago brushed a gesture against Bren’s shoulder—move now, that meant. Go.

No arguments. No choice at all.

5

It was quick passage up the stairs, back to Bren’s own rooms, where Jago’s patterned knock drew a sound of soft footsteps from inside. Tano answered the door and let them in. Algini waited, gun drawn, at the end of the foyer. That gun slipped quickly back into its holster.

But a rapid set of hand-signals passed between Jago, Tano, and Algini, while Bren stood in the foyer thinking quite desperately what he could possibly do to help them.

He found no practical use for himself in what was going on apace—he did catch the signal that meant going downstairs, which might be Jago reporting Banichi’s going down into the workings of Lord Tatiseigi’s house, down to the guard stations and other establishments. But there was another sign that meant hostile movement, and they signed understanding, agreement.

Then Jago did a curious thing. She went into the room, retrieved his computer from its hiding place, and set it on the table.

Maybe there was a use for him. Bren went to oversee this handling of an instrument so precious to their affairs. She meaningfully drew back a chair in front of the machine and signalled Tano and Algini to come over.

Bren sat down and silently brought up the typing function, keying over to Ragi as Jago drew up a second chair beside him.

She drew the machine over into range and typed, for the two looking over her shoulder, perhaps most of all for his benefit: Gegini has arrived with two of his lieutenants, claiming to speak for the Guild regarding a letter from this household. There will be others outside who have not made themselves evident.

Algini and Tano, reading over her shoulder, assumed a grim look—Bren flung a glance in their direction, then looked again at the screen, where Jago had typed quickly: The old Guildmaster should have sent. Clearly he has not. Either he is dead or this is an unauthorized mission, attempting to claim authority over us. Gegini is a Padi Valley man, Madi clan. He is here acting as if he were Guildmaster.

That was a small clan, attached—Bren raked his years-ago memory—to the Ragi on one hand, to the Taibeni and to the Kadagidi by blood and marriage. This Gegini, a name he had never heard, was a man with ties in all directions; a dangerous man, if disposed to be—and acting as if he were Guildmaster? To his experience, that entity never admitted his identity, never advertised his office—he permitted no likeness, gave no interviews, wore no identifying badge, and carried no special credentials. So rumor said of an individual only other Guild could identify, by signs outsiders didn’t know.

Atageini Guild reports numerous things. The vote for the Guild to act to overthrow an aiji requires a two-thirds majority, and it was reported to the Guild that the coup against Tabini-aiji was an accomplished fact, and that he was dead. When it was reported within a few hours that he was alive, the Guild should have moved in his support. It did not act. When it was proposed the Guild should throw Murini out of Shejidan, there was a vote on the question, which legally should not have happened, since it falsely supposed that the two-thirds majority rule was needed to overthrow Murini under those circumstances. It was a clever move, calling the vote that way, and calling on short notice. We and the dowager’s staff and Lord Geigi’s were absent in space. Others who would have voted for intervention were at Malguri and on the coast. Atageini Guild were not notified at all, except to send proxies, who were not properly instructed as to the question. The aiji’s staff, half of whom were dead and should not have been counted, were counted, along with the living members of that staff, as wilfully absent. Several other large contingents were called back by attacks aimed at their interests.

“God,” Bren said finally—-sure that his staff had known this much from Lord Geigi’s staff before they ever left the station— everything but the bits that involved Tabini: Those had likely dropped into the pot here, only filling out the scandal. The Guild never talked about its private business, he wasn’t entirely sure any lord downstairs had heard the half of it, and he was sure he was reading this now only because his staff was dangerously willing to breach Guild silence. Maybe it was because he was human, maybe it was because he didn’t twitch to the same instincts or have a wide and entangled man’chi.

Maybe it was because there was nowhere he could even accidentally pass such deadly secretsc secrets deadly to public confidence in the Guild itself, if this shameful business leaked.

God, did they possibly want his advice what to do, the head of their own Guild having proved unable to stop this?

It went on.

The meeting hour was moved up and proxies did not arrive until the vote was over. Two of Lord Geigi’s house were killed on the way, and no one has heard from the Guildmaster since the hour of the vote. The rumor in this house is that he is dead. This has been the state of affairs since the day after the attack on the aiji’s household.

No wonder his staff had gone about with very grim faces.

Jago typed: Now Gegini has made his first public move, coming here as if he were Guildmaster. We believe he is no more than Murini’s agent, and that any vote in the Guild that he has had a hand in is no legitimate vote. His presence here is ostensibly in response to the gathering and to the letters. By coming here and taking a hand as judge, he is effectively calling himself Guildmaster, and since no one knows the face or the age of the Guildmaster, no one but Guild can contradict him. We, along with the Atageini, suspect the old Guildmaster has died or is under duress.

A thought leaped to mind. Bren reached for the computer and slid it back. He typed: Have the Atageini Guild told their lord these things? And are not the Ajuri in effect a part of the Kadagidi Association? Are they possibly here as Gegini’s allies?

Jago slid the machine back to her section of table. As for the Atageini staff, they have said little to their lord.

With good reason. Tatiseigi, honest old man, would have exploded and thrown Gegini off his doorstep when he showed up, putting the fat well and truly into the fire.

The Ajuri position is ambiguous and cannot be comfortable at this moment, if indeed the Ajuri Guildsmen have informed their lord. It was clear that Tabini-aiji places some confidence in the information the Ajuri brought him, and it did not seem to be information known to Gegini. That may have embarrassed him.

Tabini’s citing Kadiyi’s information about the legislature in rebellion. In retrospect, throwing that information onto the table assumed the character of a major risk—though it did appear to have scored, when Tabini had used itc as if perhaps Gegini’s information was not as thorough or as free-flowing as he might have thought.

He snagged the computer back again. Tabini used Kadiyi’s information, seeming to rely on it. It appeared to hit unexpectedly.

Is it possible the Ajuri in coming here and delivering this news are representing a hitherto silent segment of the Kadagidi Association itself, and signaling possible opposition to Murini within his own clan?

Back to Jago, rapidly. We have attempted to find such indications in these events, but the Ajuri Guildsmen are close-mouthed and large-eyed.

A proverb meaning they said nothing useful and were nosy in the extreme, poking into household business.

But we are speculating in all this, Jago wrote.

In writing his letter of appeal to the Guild, he had thought he knew who he was writing to. He had assumed a true impartiality on the part of the Guild and Banichi and Jago had never warned him otherwise. He slid the machine back: Did you know these things when you aided my sending the letter} She typed, It was useful, though risky. For the record, it signaled a willingness of your faction to talk with Guild leadership. This was a valuable move.

Valuable. He was utterly aghast, for half a breath, that his staff had let him make a critical and dangerous move, and not informed him that he might be writing to a dead man, and asking Tatiseigi to send a provocative letter under his seal.

Then he recalled Guild strictures, Guild secrecy, which it was worth their lives and his to breach. The wonder was that they were telling him the truth now. Something major had shifted, notably when Gegini had shown up on the doorstep, notably when that letter had stirred a response out of their enemy.

Banichi has gone to talk to house security, Jago typed, and to any domestic staff who has gone down to the basement, of which there may be no few—a flood of persons wanting to exchange information between staffs, one suspects. We let the letter go out because it is a step that should have been taken, legally. Gegini attempts to use it as a key to Tatiseigi’s door, and a way onto his grounds. If Murini was ambitious—so is Gegini. No one ever proclaims himself as Guildmaster in publicc the Guildmaster only comes and goes, and we know, but not even the aiji knows for certain. That power exists in secret. It supports the aiji. It is not only the hasdrawad and the tashrid that vote on the succession, Bren-nandi.”

Dammit. Dammit to bloody hell. He had the notion that the word Gegini had informed Tano and Algini instantly of everything they had to fear.

Hell—maybe more than Jago herself or Banichi knew, when they had come down here. Tano and Algini had spent the last two years up on the station where they could monitor what was happening on the mainland, if not communicate back and forth with any freedom.

They had known what was going on before they even boarded the shuttle to come with himc they had known at least whatever Geigi’s staff could get from their estate down on the coastc No, but the dish had gone down with the coup. Mogari-nai had stopped transmitting, and all the orbiting station had had to go on was Yolanda Mercheson’s translation of the illicit radio traffic back and forth across the straits. There was no way Guild business could get through that filter, no way Yolanda, of all people, was going to get that kind of confidence.

So Tano and Algini—and all Geigi’s staff, for that matter— hadn’t known; had likely known enough that they’d burned to get down here and find out, and any opposition to Murini had taken to the hills along with Tabini.

Like that staff his own didn’t trust.

God, there were a thousand questions he wanted to ask his staff in a give and take fashion, not this pecking at keys—but with Gegini’s crew ensconced in the building, and likely more conversant in Mosphei’ than he would wish, there seemed no— “Jago-ji,” he said, and launched into kyo, a language it was absolutely certain only those of them who had been in far space understood—and Tano and Algini were not themselves in that company. “Say.”

Her eyes sparkled. Kyo took a moment or two of mental adjustment. A deep breath, a refocus. Then: “They come to make war inside the house. Remove Tabini, the dowager, the heir and you, all at one time. No Tabini, no opposition. All this gathering dissolves. This man rules. Even Murini will not be safe in his bed.”

Their collective command of kyo was not that deep: They had had only weeks to gather vocabulary. But it served. And in a handful of words, he had the finishing touches on the whole disturbing picture.

Jago then went back to typing, specifically for Tano and Algini.

We must prepare for assault inside the house. The question is whether we shall take this opportunity to remove Gegini. He knows he is taking that chance, which is a point in favor of his survival: There is even the chance he is buttering both sides of his bread and hoping to test his power if he should shift to Tabini-aiji and let Murini fall. He will be reading the tides of public opinion. What the aiji said about the legislative disaffection has given Gegini pause.

This may cause him to attempt to contact and check his associates on the grounds. We must not misjudge such movements.

Bren shot her a look. Jago, offering mitigating opinions on this villain? He doubted itc though hers was a profession which routinely thought the unthinkable, did the undefendable, simply because it was, in the service of some house or other, reasonably practical. The Jago who shared his bed and the Jago who defended him could not be divorced from one another, but he had the most queasy thought that he had let himself slip into a reality of his own devising in that regard, that he did not understand what was going on within his own staff. Would they support this man, if he turned coat yet again?

“I am doubtful,” he said in kyo, and Jago looked at him— looked at him with what an outsider might judge as no expression at all, but which he saw very keenly: It was Jago completely on guard, Jago following the essentially ruthless line of thought that her Guild required. It was Jago as scary as hell in that moment, and he thought it was probably time for a wise lord to shut up, go read a book, and let his staff operate in their own way, bloodshed and all—it was beyond talk. They were in operational mode now, where the paidhi had absolutely no useful function except to stay alive.

Misjudge Gegini’s movements. That had a lot of meanings, too, not just that Jago thought they might have been wanting in charity toward the man. It might mean Jago was worried she didn’t know what the man was up to—a usurper in her own Guild, someone senior and clever enough to have taken out the Guildmaster.

Now, indeed, if Murini, under the threat of their return, was weakening, who knew what Gegini was up to in coming here, or even if—God help him, the brain had to spin in circles, dealing with the Guild—Gegini might be unwilling to support an ephemeral candidate. Who knew whose hand was steering this thing, or whether there was another lord waiting in the wings, ready to doublecross everyone? Clearly his own staff had a lot to think through.

Algini threw off a flurry of handsigns. Jago signed back.

It was not right. It just was not right. His staff was attempting to maneuver in an increasingly cramped set of alternatives, and assets—-assets which were unusable, except with the risk of an ungodly amount of bloodshed.

Risk. Hell.

He snatched the computer. If I went out on the steps tonight, if I went among the crowd and told them what we have to tell them, we could stir popular opinion, and maybe tilt the balance, if one is in question.

A quick, signed negative. Emphatic.

He typed: If I have any use in the world, Jago-ji, if I came back to any advantage, it rests within that computer. Tabini-aiji finds it inconvenient to hear my report. I do not understand why he refuses me. But perhaps the details may still help his case and explain things to the crowd out there. If they collectively petitioned the Guild— Second sign. Negative. Jago drew the computer back forcefully and typed: If the aiji hears you first, he cannot then swear that he does not know the content of the report nor had a hand in it. You will clearly bring this document to the tashrid yourself, with the full case to lay out for them in your own name, on the aiji’s behalf.

Legislative rules. A petitioner—Tabini—could not influence evidence to be presented before the legislature, not without greatly diminishing its value.

My God, he thought. He knew the rule. But himself, not Tabini, to stand and present the case for Tabini’s argument against Murini?

The master manipulator, Tabini, intended to bring his controversial human adviser right to the center of the debate, and let him give his report there, where they probably had enough Filings against him to paper these walls?

Jago had drawn that conclusion, at least, and if she was right, then Tabini had made up his mind to that course the moment he had gotten the staff reports from the dowager. The stunning announcement, maximum controversy—the appearance of himself—in the capital, in the Bujavid, which at present was under Murini’s controlc How in hell were they going to pull that off?

“How, precisely,” he began aloud, all he needed to say, and Jago typed: This will have to be finessed.

Finessed. That lethal word. His fingers began to go numb, that sign of blood rushing to brain and body core. Oxygen seemed short even so, and he rubbed his fingertips together to remind himself of his physical body, so deep his dive into intellect and hypothesis. He recalled his own apartment in the Bujavid with such vividness he could see the pattern in the porcelains, the details of his own bedroom, the central hall, the foyer with its little filigree basket beside the entryc If there were messages waiting for him in that bowl, what would they say?

Traitor?

Foreigner, go home?

Your fault, paidhi, all the loss of lives?

The destruction of our traditions, our values, our way of life?

The outer halls, then, the residencies, marble halls with priceless antique carpets and room for the old families, the old houses, in all those suites of rooms—into whose midst Tabini-aiji had installed him—him, asking more and more from him. Tabini had lifted his human adviser out of his old modest apartment with the garden door, down across from the aiji’s cook, the aiji’s secretariesc the rank paidhiin had always held in the aiji’s court.

Years ago, the aiji had elevated not only him, but the chain of contact he represented, to a dizzying preeminence in the court, a preeminence that had gotten higher and higher, until it greatly offended essential supporters— Until it at last fractured the aishidi’tat and he had now to preside over what might become a catastrophe, one to equal the War of the Landing?

What was he supposed to do now? Stay alive long enough to bring his case before a legislature the majority of whom, even if denying support to Murini, sincerely wished him and his influence in the aiji’s family to fall, so that they could start warring among themselves?

“Does Banichi think this, too?” he asked in kyo, which drew a blank look from Tano and Algini, but not from Jago.

“Yes,” she said firmly, with that fire in her eye that said somehow, perhaps in code passed hand in hand, she and Banichi had already agreed on measures.

Something was moving then, and maybe moving fast, and it was high time he took himself out of his staff’s way. He got up, left the computer to Jago, if she might need it.

But he saw now a flurry of handsigns between Jago and Tano and Algini, most of which he couldn’t read—they involved the windows and the baggage, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure.

What shall I do? he asked himself. If we start a fight—God, what am I supposed to do? All those people on the lawn, all Tabini’s man’chic if they lose a fight herec if somehow something happens to Tabini— “Yes,” Algini said aloud, in answer to Jago’s sign, and went to the console, flipped a switch, went to the window, opened it onto the dark, and threw a leg over the sill.

There’s no foothold, Bren thought in alarm, wondering what possible good it could do for Algini to hang out the window— but he didn’t hang: he vanished straight down into the dark with a mechanical whirr, leaving only a silver hook embedded in Tatiseigi’s woodwork and a taut metal line cutting a nasty gouge in the painted wood.

Jago walked over and matter-of-factly picked the hook loose and tossed it out, returning it, presumably, to Algini, who was now, equally presumably, safe on the ground below.

What in hell are we about to do? Bren asked himself, concluded that Algini was in considerable personal danger loose on the grounds, and hoped that he was only on his way to Banichi for personal discussion.

He concluded that, and wished he knew for sure. Tano looked worried about his partner, as if he wished he were out there, and would give anything to follow him. But Tano dutifully sat down at the little black box’s console and adjusted a com-plug in his ear, keeping up with things on a communications network which no one now dared use—presumably.

Bren cast Jago a look, wanting explanation, and Jago just folded the computer up, slipped it into its case, and handed the case over to him—more than handed it over: slipped the strap onto his shoulder. Keep up with it, that was to tell him, without saying anything that listeners might pick up. She was through typing and through discussing.

Damn, he thought. He went and sat down out of the way with the computer on his lap, and Jago paced the floor, not consciously so, perhaps, but she kept moving between Tano’s console and the vicinity of the bath.

Something was damned sure happening, and he feared it wasn’t just a meeting with Banichi and Cenedi.

If our staff gives these high-ranking Guildsmen the slip, he thought, it’s going to be a professional embarrassment to some very dangerous people. A career embarrassment.

It’s going to be war, out there.

He got up, still with the computer strap on his shoulder, and stayed out of Jago’s path, not even making eye contact with her while she was thinking and watching over Tano’s shoulder. He went to the cabinet where he had stowed his pistol, his ammunition, and his pills. A breeze blew in from the open, un-barriered window as he stuffed his pockets. His warmer coat, to his regret, was with the servants. The heavy pistol made the dress coat hang oddly, and he told himself that one of these days he was going to have to have to get a holster for the thing before he shot himself in some embarrassing and fatal spot.

On his next trip to the Island he would do that. Better than having it customed over herec not that personal apparel wasn’t always handmade on this side of the water. It was the patterns, the proportions. He’d get a half dozen warm coats when he got back to the Island. Some gloves. That was one of the hardest things, getting human-proportioned glovesc Gloves, for God’s sake. His mind, if he let it work, wandered helplessly in the dark outside the house, wondering what Algini was doing and where he was—he was their demolitions expert, if one had to assign Algini a speciality: Tano for electronics, Algini for blowing things up, and while he worried, Tano was sitting over there listening to something he wished he could hear. From time to time Tano and Jago traded hand-signs, both of them privy to that information flow, as he wasn’t.

He slipped back to his chair and sat down, arranging his coat as he did so, putting the computer down beside his chair, the gun in his pocket and that pocket arranged for a quick reach. He sat and waited. And watched that dark window.

Tano signed to Jago, who came and took his place at the console while Tano went and delved into their baggage, and pulled out a particularly nasty automatic with several clips of ammunition in a shoulder loop.

Bren watched that, too, still not moving or offering comment, as Tano simply walked down their little entry hall and left them.

It was just him and Jago now. Just him and Jago, and Jago now had all her attention focused on that little console. Once she interrupted her attention to make a sign he knew: Banichi. Just that, for his benefit.

Was Banichi in trouble? Was that why Tano had armed himself and left? No. If it were Banichi in trouble, Jago was his partner.

Was it Algini who had run into a problem? Whatever was going on, he knew his security would be far more efficient if both teams were whole—and Jago couldn’t leave him, dammit to hell.

He couldn’t stand the waiting. He got up from his chair, taking his computer with him, and stood near Jago, who gave him another sign, one he raked his brain to remember. It was, perhaps, the sign for all our people lying still. Or the one for stealth.

Explosion rocked the floor underfoot, a shock into his very bones, that made him stagger and grab for the gun in his pocket.

“Quickly,” Jago said, and left the chair, grabbed the computer from him, grabbed a rifle and an ammunition belt from the baggage in the corner, and motioned him toward the outer door.

He went. He seized the computer from her as they hit the hall, headed for the stairs.

Down, then, down the public stairway as fast as he could manage it, which was far less fast than Jago could have done it, but he was only a little to the rear as they hit the main floor and met a gaggle of alarmed staff, all asking what it had been and whether a boiler had blown up.

Jago grabbed his arm and hauled him away from Tatiseigi’s people, ignoring their questions, pulling him toward the lower stairs. They went down again, down to a pale stucco hall, plainly lit, punctuated by a long series of doors, some open— servants’ territory, the underbelly of the stately home. He thought they would go to one of those rooms and find Banichi, but Jago jogged right past all such choices, down the whole length of the hall.

“Outside,” she said, not even out of breath, as they reached a short stairway. It led up again, to an exterior security door, the sort that was usually alarmed.

It was ajar at the moment, with a rock holding it open. A sliver of night showed at its edge before Jago elbowed that door open, and they exited into the dark, the two of them, emerging right by the end of the hedge and the newly restored stable fence.

Jago turned right, along the side of the house by the hedge-rimmed path, and onto the floodlit drive, where the buses had cleared back a little and rendered themselves a wall of defense.

Beyond that next hedge, across the drive, was the Taibeni camp and their mecheiti—that was where he thought they were going, but Jago drew him left, along the row of buses, passing one after the other.

Off to the distant left, an engine coughed to life, down toward the meadow. The plane, he thought. Rejiri.

His breath came hard now, and the light and shadow jolted and jagged in his blurring vision. They ran along the drive, weaving through the crowd that had gathered, and dodging more questions: “What happened at the house? Was it the Kadagidi?”

It had not been the Kadagidi attacking, he was sure of that. It was most likely the Guild they were fighting, and God and Jago only knew what they were running from or to. Blood had been spilled, possibly to get them out of the house—and to get Tabini out, he hoped above all else, all their lives depending on that one life. He was sure whatever was going on, staff was communicating, Jago doing exactly what she and Banichi had agreed had to be donec She dived among the trees, then drew him past the tail ends of two buses and a truck, and into full shadow and brush, then past a thorn thicket. He hoped to stop just there and catch his breath.

No such luck. Jago kept going at a steady jog, seizing him by the arm as the going got rough. She kept him moving and directed him deep among the trees of the little decorative copse.

“I can follow you,” he gasped, out of breath. “Go, Jago-ji.”

No question, no protest from her. She trusted him to run, and kept going.

Meanwhile the plane buzzed over their heads, headed south.

South. Toward the heart of the country.

That would be Tabini, he hoped, Tabini, and maybe it was the prevailing wind that indicated south rather than east. Maybe the plane would turn, veering off to the mountains, to safety. Rejiri would do anything in his power to keep the symbol of their resistance safe, but that plane only held three people at most, and that meant if Damiri was in that third seat, no bodyguard was going with them—safest, maybe.

Or a decoy? Was Tabini somewhere out in these woods, running the way they were running?

His legs ached. His side ached, breath a knife in his ribs, and still Jago kept jogging on in near silence, repositioning both of them to some refuge, it might be—someplace to wait for the rest of the team. He could hardly hear past his own breathing, and beyond them rose a tumult of shouted questions in the driveway, compounded with the bawling of mecheiti across the hedges. He was all but blind in the dark. Atevi hearing and atevi eyesight guided them, and he kept in Jago’s tracks, trusting her utterly.

After that one explosion there had not been one intimation of hostile action in return. What proceeded, proceeded stealthily beneath the confusion of the general assemblage, stealthy as his and Jago’s exit from the building, their dive aside into this grove of ancient trees.

She stopped near the edge of the copse, the farther meadow and part of the line of buses visible through the trees, and there she stood listening. Bren found himself a tree to lean against, fought to quiet his breathing, and not to cough or move at all, rustling about the leaf litter. The least sound might mask any untoward approach she was listening for. There might be any number of Guild Assassins loose out here. And here he stood in a pale, easily-seen court coat, trying to blend in with the trees. The shirt he wore underneath the coat was no better. He wished he’d at least stolen the bedspread. A curtain. Anything to wrap in, to mask the pallor of his skin and his dress.

A soft chirr sounded, off in the brush. Jago answered it. A moment later, a shadow slipped like a soft breeze through the woods and joined them. Tano, then another shadow: Algini, Bren was sure—he was vastly relieved to find them safe, but he was greatly concerned when another moment failed to produce Banichi.

He dared not say a thing or ask a question, least of all to Jago.

Suddenly he felt a heavy leather jacket whipped between him and the tree, enveloping his shoulders in its protective darkness. A push at his arm, a signal to move, and he hitched the strap of the computer high on his shoulder, hooked his free arm into the black coat, and struggled not to lose it in the brush as he ducked and followed Jago, Tano, and Algini behind him. The coat was warm, hot, even, in the general chill of night air. It weighed like lead, which it all but was—body armor against a stray shot, and his having it around his shoulders meant one of his team was working without protection at the moment.

Their course through the edge of the trees veered more and more toward the right, until they paralleled the end of the cobbled drive, where it became the unpaved road from the west gate.

Questions welled up, all but choking him, life and death questions about Tabini’s welfare, about Banichi, about Ilisidi and Cajeiri, and others’ whereabouts, after that groundshaking explosion—and he dared not distract his bodyguard with chatter. Were there other Assassins actively on their trail? Was Banichi coming? He hoped Tabini had been in that plane, that it had eventually banked toward the east, toward the long meadows near the mountains, where a plane could land.

Or maybe Rejiri would fly his passenger all the way west to Dur, which had hiding places aplenty, not to mention boats— or with that plane, he could even fly Tabini to Mospheira, where a shuttle crew was prepping for a return flight to the station: He had never proposed that course of action to Tabini— he had never had the chance to pose it as a choice. But Tabini surely knew that he would be safe to go to Mospheira, that he would have a welcome there from President Tyers, and he had surely gathered from the dowager that the shuttle was waiting there on an airstrip. If Tabini got up to the station, he had Lord Geigi and all the atevi aloft to rally around him, and the radio to make contact with his supporters on the ground, with Mospheiran help. If Tabini got up there and took power, there was no way in all the world for his enemies to reach him, ever, and he would be there to meet any trouble that camec But it seemed to him now that the noise of that plane had tailed off into the distance, still on a southward course.

South, toward Shejidan.

Chilling. Blood-chilling.

And he knew Tabini’s disposition, that running from a fight was the last thing Tabini would ordinarily choose. Tabini had run from Taiben coastward only when he’d been hit by surprise and had no choice. He’d had his chance then to cross the straits to Mospheira and gain help from the heavens.

Clear enough that he wouldn’t do it this time, either.

6

They waited in the woods, in a small parcel of dark—himself, Jago, Tano, and Algini, who breathed or moved gently, nothing more.

They stayed isolated from the larger, noisier dark out on the road, where voices disputed in high passion, vehicle doors slammed, and mecheiti groaned and protested. The noise of the plane had long vanished, and still the commotion out on the driveway persisted.

A shiver started up again. Bren pressed his hands against his legs, trying to still the tremors—he was cold by now, at least his legs were, while his upper body sweltered under the borrowed bulletproof jacket. He didn’t ask where Banichi was, or where Tabini was. He was resolved not to interfere with his bodyguard, no matter what.

But he saw Jago check her watch. That was the most hopeful thing. He saw the shadows that were Algini and Tano do the same, all of them privy to some forthcoming event that the paidhi didn’t know, and desperately wished he did.

A soft movement stirred the brush, not the gusting wind, he thought, and he eased his hand past the jacket, into his own coat pocket, where he had the gun and the clip. Clearly his bodyguard had heard that noise, their hearing being far more acute than his.

Bus engines had started up and another near them now coughed to life, momentarily deafening the night. More voices rose from that direction, some sort of excitement or confusion.

He couldn’t make out the shouted words above the engine noise.

He wondered if people were having second thoughts about their gesture of support, if they were going to desert Lord Tatiseigi, or if Tatiseigi himself had had second thoughts about holding out here at Tirnamardi.

No. Hell would freeze over before Tatiseigi abandoned the historic premises to Kadagidi looters.

More and more vehicle engines started, until the racket on the drive drowned their hearing and the lights blinded them to the deeper dark.

A whistle sounded near them then, low and perfectly audible above the noise. Bren’s heart leaped up. Jago whistled back, and a shadow joined them.

Banichi was back—Banichi and several other accompanying shadows whose identity Bren didn’t guess and didn’t venture to ask.

Shadow-signals passed, in too dim a light for human eyes, but enough, clearly, for his bodyguard to communicate, possibly even to recognize faces.

And Banichi was safe and had brought reinforcements with him.

Thank God.

Might one be Tabini, and the airplane a diversion? None were tall enough.

“Come,” Jago said, and a grip on his arm rescued him immediately as he foolishly caught his foot in a root and nearly fell flat on his face. Jago settled the jacket back onto his shoulder. He forged ahead, trying to keep an atevi pace, blind in the dark. Jago, who could see, cued him with pressure on his arm where to dodge an obstacle, steered him through a gap in the hedge where headlamps blazed and trucks and buses loomed up like strange lumpish beasts. Fumes from their engines stung the ordinarily pristine air, hazing the light like fog.

Banichi took the lead of their group, and slipped through the gap between two buses. Headlamps threw him into distinction for a moment. Those few newcomers with him—illumined for the instant in the lights—proved to be Taibeni, and one other who looked like one of Tatiseigi’s security staff. Bren sucked in his breath and kept with Jago, moving quickly in the lights and feeling like a pale-skinned prime target as she directed him on Banichi’s track, around into the second lane of vehicles.

Banichi had stopped by a bus door, holding the mounting rail and, the moment Jago brought him up, Banichi seized Bren’s arm and propelled him up the three towering, atevi-sized steps onto the deck.

Bren stumbled onto the last step, used a push of his hand on the flooring and a snatch at the passenger rail to haul himself aboard.

Another hand seized his shoulder and hauled him into the aisle as the rest of his team clambered up after him, their strength and weight rocking the bus, which, unlike others, sat dark and quiet, its aisle and its occupants all in shadow.

“Nand’ Bren!” a young voice exclaimed—a voice he knew as well as he knew the dowager’s. Cajeiri was aboard. And the bus seats—headlamps of other vehicles provided a glow through the windows, enough, at least, for outlines and shadows—filled with passengers, might contain the Taibeni youngsters, at least, if not the dowager herself—he expected her, and Cenedi, and the men he knew.

“Here,” that high young voice said, and a hand reached across the back of an empty seat, patting it—a whole vacant bench seat in an otherwise crowded bus. Doubtless the young folk had preserved it for him. He set a knee in the seat and strained his eyes forward, searching among those standing in the aisle, concerned to make sure all his own bodyguard had made it aboard—whatever this hurry meant, wherever they were about to go.

To the mountains, maybe. To safety—masked by all this to-do, this shifting of pieces on the board.

A shadow loomed above him. A heavy hand rested on his shoulder. He sensed rather than saw Banichi’s presence shutting out the light from that direction.

“Are you all right?” he asked Banichi as he heard the bus door shut.“Where are we going, Banichi-ji?”

“To Shejidan,” Banichi said.

“The Guild officers,” he began.

“They and theirs are no longer a concern,” Banichi reported.

Not a concern. Just that. There had surely been fatalities in that explosion—fatalities that encompassed the self-proclaimed highest leadership of Banichi’s own Guild—not men they supported, but not easy men to take down, all the same.

And the Assassins who might have come onto the grounds with that pair? Disposed of, just like that?

One noted that they still weren’t turning lights on inside this particular bus. A handful of other vehicles were lit up inside, interior lights recklessly blazing out into the night, while ordinary folk, townsmen and others, got to their seats in what one could only take as a general departure of the massed vehicles.

“Sit down, Bren-ji,” Banichi advised him. “We shall be moving in a moment.”

Shejidan, Banichi had said. All of them, evidently, were headed straight into confrontation.

Banichi left him. He subsided into the seat next to the window.

He had not seen Tano and Algini board, but he was convinced by now that his entire contingent had made it onto the bus, though there were only shadows and occasional profiles to tell him soc seated as he was, and with the backs of heads to look past, he saw one profile that looked very much like Tano talking to one he was sure was Jago.

The red and blue taillights of the bus in front of theirs flared to life, and white light stabbed rear to front of their bus, the headlamps of the bus behind. It was indeed Tano, without his jacket. Algini was with him. Thank God.

In that moment a human-sized form slipped around the end of the seat and scrambled in beside him, breathless and excited, a young hand catching at his arm. “Nand’ Bren! Did you hear how someone blew up the Guild officers?”

“One understands that to be the case, young sir.” He schooled his voice to evenness and dignity, appalled, even so, by the enthusiasm in that young voice. “Is your great-grandmother aboard?”

“Up there,” Cajeiri said, pointing, one thought, to the bus ahead of them “Papa said we should not all be together in the same vehicle, in case of bombs.”

“A very good idea, one is sure.” But not a good idea in public relations, dammit, to put the heir so publicly into the paidhi’s care.

A shiver ran through him. Bren worked his fingers, trying to drive out the night chill that had his hands like ice, trying at the same time to render his breaths even and composed and, thinking that the boy knew far more than he did: “Do you know if we are going to the train station, or just where, young sir?”

“We think we shall go all the way to Shejidan.”

“Do roads even go there?”

“Except a very short bit in the south, which Cenedi thinks we can cross with no trouble. Uncle Tatiseigi has a whole book of maps!”

Thinks we can cross, echoed in Bren’s head, as he numbly braced his computer next to him in the seat, an armrest on the left, against the wall. A book of maps, probably the very finest, most expensive, fifty years ago.

No trouble, is it? He was more than dubious about the information. Shejidan? Not likely, he said to himself.

Cajeiri got up on his knees on the seat and turned around to exclaim to his young bodyguard, “Have you the packets with our breakfast, Gari-ji? The paidhi will be very hungry.”

The paidhi’s stomach was upset. Breakfast was very far from his mind, but a packet came forward, and Cajeiri handed him a fruit bar, taking another for himself.

And no sooner had the boy gotten up on his knees again to lean on the seat back than the bus ahead of them started to move, slowly lumbering forward.

That seemed to indicate that other buses in line ahead of it were moving, but how they advanced any distance at all in that direction, considering the complete fender-to-fender jam-up in the hedged driveway, Bren was far from sure. Cajeiri twisted back forward and plumped down in his appropriated seat.

The bus ahead of them turned where Bren was sure there was no turn, right into the hedge, as happened, a parting insult to the manicured planting that had separated the drive from the Taibeni camp.

Their own turn followed, broken hedge branches scraping the sides and bottom of their bus as they ground, lurched, and bumped their way over the roots.

Then it was soft lawn. The Taibeni must be on the move, camp struck, mecheiti all moved out. Their bus gathered speed, following a line of taillights that snaked ahead in the dark, a line of about two dozen or so buses and trucks.

“Where is your father at the moment, young sir?” Bren asked Cajeiri. It was one of those things which ordinarily they might not be supposed to know, but if the boy did know, the knowledge was on this bus already.

“He flew!” Cajeiri said, and did one imagine within that awe a profound indignation that he had been left behind? “Cenedi made up nine gasoline bombs out of wine bottles!— and papa went with nand’ Rejiri, and they are going to drop them on the Kadagidi if they come at us while we move.”

My God, he thought, bombs from airplanes were illegal as hell—and he could no longer restrain himself, no matter the bus was bouncing over the turf in a general advance back toward the hedge and the road. He got to his feet, holding to the seat in front of him, eased his way past Cajeiri, and holding to other seat backs as the bus bucked and jolted over the turf, he searched faces and forms in the dim, diffused light of headlamps behind and taillights ahead. They were passing the estate boundary, crossing past the open gate, and turning off south, he was sure it was south. Toward the train station.

“Jago-ji.” He identified her standing in the aisle with Banichi, and she obligingly moved a few steps back to him, bracing herself against the seat on the other side of the aisle.

“Is the aiji indeed flying with Rejiri, Jago-ji?” he asked. “Are they planning to bomb the Kadagidi?”

“Only if they need to, nandi. Only if we come under attack. Such an action is hardly kabiu.”

To say the least. “Do they hope that they can actually land in the capital?”

“By no means, at this moment, nandi. But the young man seems quite skilled at finding landing places in open territory.”

The young man in question had a notorious history of seat-of-the-pants flying. One could only envision some pasturage, some meadow which would set Tabini and the boy alone, with nine—fortunate nine!—damned wine bottles full of petrol, somewhere far removed from help, after making enough noise to alert enemies from half a dozen townships.

“What are we doing, meanwhile?” he asked. “What do we hope to do?”

“We shall go to the capital ourselves,” Jago said. “The paidhi must go.They are calling the legislature, Bren-ji.”

The legislature, in whom there had been, within the day, an outbreak of acute sore throat. A body which had defied a summons from Murini. But Tabini believed it would answer him and come in.

“How has he called them, Jago-ji? Are we public, on the air?” To do anything involving general broadcast would set the whole country in an upheaval—and he had no idea how they would do that.

“We have our means,” Jago said, that we almost certainly encompassed immediate company, her partner, her hijacked Guild, and electronics to which outsiders had no access. They were matters into which prudent outsiders were not supposed to inquire, and into which he had by no means meant to trespass, God help them all. It meant they were not broadcasting for general hearing, and it meant there was far less chance Mospheira knew what was happening right now. It was, as far as a roaring great column of buses could be, a clandestine advance.

“But the Guild officers,” he began, still aching for information, any small bit she could give him. “Have they gotten out a message?”

“These persons were so imprudent as to lodge in an upstairs room in an ancient and hostile building. These historic houses are barrel vault upon barrel vault and massively built—precision in such matters is quite possible.”

“Were we in an upstairs room, nadi!”

A tone of amused shock. “But, Bren-ji, we never allowed enemies to occupy the room beneath us!”

Tatiseigi would have an apoplexy about his missing floor, was all he could think for the moment. The enormity of what his staff had done, in terms of assassinating Guild representatives—perhaps Guild leadership—he could hardly grasp. But no message to Shejidan had gone, it seemed; clandestine hardly described them, and certain forces were likely scrambling to meet their challenge.

And the Guild officers were dead. If the two had imagined that they had actually installed any proper precautions in the room below them, if they had had confidence in the man’chi of someone within the house, in the Atageini staff or otherwise to aid and abet their movements— Clearly someone had prevented those particular precautions from moving into position in the room below. His staff seemed extraordinarily well-briefed on what had happened, even smug, if he could read Jago’s tone.

And he knew their ways. He knew that Banichi had no inclination to be the second man into an action he could much better direct, or to take a purely defensive position when someone aimed at their lives. Neither was Cenedi so inclined, nor was the dowager he served—Tatiseigi might have hesitated, even Tabini might have paused to consider. But the only likely argument between Cenedi and Banichi after two years of running operations together would have been which of them moved first.

The Guild officers, the biggest threat to come at them directly from Murini’s side, hadn’t even made it to supper.

And what did Banichi do next? Now what did one possibly do, when one had blown up one’s own officers, and was running buses full of farmers into the capital?

At the moment he felt inclined to sink down into the nearest seat and let his stomach settle, but his own seat was a few rows back, and the nearest was occupied, like most of the seats, by an ordinary provincial, a man in a rough canvas jacket, with a hunting rifle in callused hands. The type was everywhere. In all those buses. Tabini was in the airplane, and Banichi and Cenedi were calling the shots, never mind Tabini’s personal bodyguard.

He was suddenly overwhelmed by the scale of it. By the force of what they had launched.

“You should sit down, Bren-ji,” Jago said.

“This is a war we bring, Jago-ji.” Atevi society had known no open warfare since the War of the Landing—skirmishes, yes; civil unrest, yes; sniping between bodyguards of lords in conflict, constantly—but not a conflict that swept up every clan on the continent, flagrantly involving bystanders. Not involving middle-aged men with hunting rifles.

And assassinating Guild officers, the Guild being supposedly the keepers of the law and the peace, the impartial, every-sided court of appealc impartiality and fairness had clearly gone by the board; so had legally mandated support for the sitting aiji. But his staff had delivered an answer for it.

“Bren-ji?”

“Do we hope simply to drive all the way into Shejidan, Jago-ji?”

“Perhaps.” Far too lightly.

“Or are we going to the train station?”

“We refuel there, nandi, at the station pump.”

“And the Guild? Are they moving against us?”

“We have moved to convince certain forces within the Guild, persons of certain man’chi, nandi—that Gegini was no fit leader.”

Not from the grave, he wasn’t, that was quite clear.

Cenedi and Banichi. Extravagant action, high and wide action, of a sort subordinates didn’t undertake on their own.

It was not just to protect him, he thought. It was much beyond that. Banichi and Jago had been Tabini’s staffers before they were his. In the nature of things, there always was one higher man’chi that overrode what they owed to him.

So had Tabini appropriated them? Given them such an order? Or had the dowager herself?

And coordinated it, dammit all. The echoes of that explosion had hardly died before Tabini was airborne, headed into trouble ahead of them, precipitating this flood of buses and trucks.

Follow, Tabini was saying to all who had ever followed him—irresistible as the mecheiti leader, dashing hellbent for whatever destination, in the echoes of that explosion. Atevi of the Ragi man’chi were feeling more than an emotional tug at their hearts. Their whole being plunged toward that leader, pell mell, an attraction not in his wiring. He might be immune for the hour, capable of a second, critical thought—deciding things on love, that slower, more anguished emotion. But his staff wasn’t wired that way. It was the aiji who’d called, and they’d moved. Ruthlessly, comprehensively, without consulting himc dammit.

“The aiji ordered you,” he said to Jago. “Did he? He didn’t rely on his own security.”

Jago’s hand closed on his wrist. “We may die in this effort, Bren-ji. And our Guild resists emotional decisions. But this time, yes, we are obliged to go.”

“The paidhi is likewise obliged,” he said, closing his hand atop hers, a contact atevi ordinarily did not invite or accept. “We humans have our own feelings. We understand.” He did. Tabini had called in a debt, drafted his staff, the dowager’s, his own. They could get killed. But if it was the time to do it, if his staff was going, then he damned sure was. “Are the Atageini going into this on the same grounds? Are they solidly with us?”

“They must,” Jago said, and it made sense. Tatiseigi’s historic premises now had suffered at least two rooms in utter wreckage, the upstairs premises and the room immediately below, not to mention the lily foyer, the stables, and the driveway hedge.

Ridiculous items on the surface—but a matter of Atageini sovereignty.

Add to the stack of circumstances, the self-claimed Guild-master was dead within an hour of his arrival under Tatiseigi’s roof—it could be argued it had been about an hour short of their own intention to assassinate Tabini—a first strike against Ragi power, but the Atageini had been the site of the response, and they had had to make a fast decision.

As Murini had been prepared to make. His own shaken wits informed him that if Guild had come in to assassinate Tabini, it was not going to be the final blow, and it was not going to stop any time soon. There was much, much more intended.

Tatiseigi had had no choice but become involved—the epicenter of the event, exposed to any outrage, beginning with that Guild intrusion, and expanding to every alliance the old man had. The old man had seen it come over the horizon when the dowager had showed up at his gates. Murini had sent in the Kadagidi, Tabini had moved in immediately after with his counterrevolution, the Guild had come in next to take Tabini out in a finessed strike, one that would leave the dowager alive, for her unique value to national stability, and no one had ever seemed to care about Tatiseigi in the process—but only one outcome of this whole affair possibly led to Tatiseigi’s grand-nephew being in supreme power over the aishidi’tat, and he wasn’t letting events pass him by this time.

An entire lifetime of evading conflict until the dust was already settling, a lifetime of being moderately obstructionist to Tabini’s modernization policy, and suddenly Tatiseigi was taking his whole province to war behind Tabini-aiji to put him back in power.

He found his way back to his seat, Cajeiri meanwhile kneeling and talking volubly to his two young escorts, who held the seat behind. Cajeiri turned around as Bren eased past that obstruction and sat down in his own place next to the window.

“The other buses are supposed to keep this bus on the inside,”

Cajeiri informed him. “So snipers will have no targets. But we should keep our heads down if shooting starts, nand’ paidhi, Nawari said so, because it will be very heavy guns and they could blow this bus to bits.”

Cheerful lad. “Whose bus is this, does one have any notion?

“It belongs to Dur,” Cajeiri said, which was Rejiri’s clan. “The lord of Dur and his bodyguard and the fishers’ association, too, nandi! They came in from the train station while the young lord took the plane! —I know where Dur is,” he added, apropos of nothing about the bus itself. Ilisidi had kept him at his lessons during their flight, and he did know his provinces. “Dur helped mani-ma in previous times.”

“That they did, young sir,” Bren murmured. He had an inner vision of a nightbound coast with fire and smoke on every hand, and an improbable ferryboat plowing in toward the beach at the most critical of moments. ”And so they help her again, for which we all shall remember them with great favor.”

If any of them lived long enough to remember this current madness. But it was what a proper nobleman said, regarding a favor. Favors lived long past the favor-doers. Favors bound the generations together. It was one of those givens, that a house never forgot an obligation. And his house must not—if he could have any progeny. The thought had dawned on him long before this, that this boy came as close as he himself could ask, the child of his teaching, the boy he was going to send into years beyond his reach.

Remember them. Remember the favors, boy. Keep the old alliances.

“And if bullets do start flying, young sir, I shall rely on you to hit the floor with me. You and your bodyguard. And no guns, if you please. This is a situation where experience counts. One is obliged to be an extremely accurate shot, firing out these windows. There are too many allies wandering around out there.”

“One hears, nandi.” Cajeiri slumped down a little in his seat, arms folded, perhaps remembering his own baptism in fire, not long removed, when he had, though justifiably, killed a man. Tabini’s son was not, of course, if one should ask him, afraid. Tabini’s son, the dowager’s great-grandson, was given no opportunity to be afraid.

Or at least he had never had permission to show it. Delight in gore was, perhaps, his one means of defying the things that scared him very badly.

“Good lad,” Bren said, resisting any human notion he might have of patting the boy on the shoulder. The days when he could do that were passing, hurtling away by the second, as fast as the boy’s childhood. “Brave lad.”

He ought in fact to tell Cajeiri to move away from him and not come near him again on this entire journey. The windows were no protection from snipers, and he was in all respects conspicuous, one pale target shining in any scope. It would be the ultimate tragedy if someone aiming at him accidentally killed the heir.

Some vehicle passed them in the dark, two gold headlamps and an entirely improbable sight coming up from behind—an open convertible, with driver, guard, and two conspicuous occupants, the passenger seats facing backward as well as forward. He leaned forward, not quite believing his eyes, and finding they had not deceived him. It was indeed Lord Tatiseigi and Ilisidi in that open car, passing them at a rate that had to tax that antique vehicle.

One had thought Lord Tatiseigi had only owned one automobile, and that surely gone with the stables. Clearly not.

Cajeiri had to see what he was looking at so concentratedly, and leaned hard against him, peering out the window.

“Great-grandmother and great-uncle!” Cajeiri exclaimed in distress. “With Cenedi, one thinks, nandi, in that old car!”

“Indeed it is,” he said, and had a very uncomfortable feeling about what he saw, so uncomfortable a feeling that he excused himself out of his seat and went up the aisle to point out the sight to Jago and Tano. “The aiji-dowager and Lord Tatiseigi just passed us in an open car!”

Tano bent for a look out the windows. So did Jago.

“This is very reckless,” Bren protested, compelled by atevi idiom to a towering understatement. “This is extremely reckless of them, nadiin-ji. What can they be thinking?”

Jago cast him a shadowy look which, in the near dark, he could not read; but she went farther forward to inform Banichi of the situation.

Ilisidi, deciding to make the grand gesture, Bren thought to himself. Tatiseigi, who had been late to every battlefield, whose house had been assaulted, was making his own grand, potentially fatal gesture, right along with the aiji-dowager, who had mixed herself in every conflict of the last half century and more. Now she had shamed the old reprobate into joining her, one romantic fling at destinyc God, no. They couldn’t.

He staggered his way, burdened with the armored jacket, down the aisle, intent on having his own word with Banichi.

“Banichi-ji, they are trying to kill themselves. They are trying to compel the rebels, are they not, by force of example and man’chi and the dowager’s allies? We cannot allow this!”

“One hardly knows how to stop them at this point,” Banichi muttered, bending low to have a look at what now was out of sight.

“We can at least keep up with them, nadiin,” Bren said.

“Yes,” Banichi said, and moved forward in the bus, up to talk to the driver, and presumably to the old lord of Dur, who, conspicuous in his court dress, in a seat next the driver, and accompanied by several dark-clad bodyguards, was surely due the courtesy of an address. Bren moved up into the general neighborhood, and heard Banichi pointing out the situation to the lord of Dur. The lord—Rejiri’s father—got up from his seat, leaned on the rail, gazing out the front windows at a fading column of lamplit dust, and waved commands at the driver, who with powerful moves of the wheel, swung the bus out of the column in relatively hot pursuit.

“Keep up with them!” the lord of Dur urged his driver. “Go. Go!”

“Your lordship,” Bren said diffidently, edging into the lord’s presence.“One is grateful, for the sake of the young gentleman and the dowager. I am Bren, the paidhi-aiji, an old associate of your sonc”

“As who could ever mistake the paidhi-aiji!” Dur cried, and gave a little nod by way of a bow. His personal name was Adigan, Bren recalled that detail the moment the man spoke, immensely relieved to have old resources coming back to him at need. “The distinguished associate of my foolhardy son! Indeed, we are honored, nand’ paidhi, extremely honored to provide yourself and the aiji’s heir our stolen transport. In the haste of boarding and departure, there was little leisure, nor any desire to distract your lordship from needful ordersc but one is extremely glad to find you well.”

“The honor is very much mine, nand’ Adigan. One offers most profound gratitude for your gracious welcome, above all for the steadfastness of your house and that excellent young man, your son—” The courtesies flowed desperately on, needful as a steady heartbeat, while the bus engine roared and the driveshaft and the oil pan somehow survived the impact of rocks flung up from underneath as the bus lurched.

Then brush scraped under them, the bus running outside the column onto rougher ground. They chased those dust-veiled taillights, bouncing and bumping so that Bren had to hook both arms around an upright rail. “To you and yours we are profoundly indebted, Lord Adigan. Your son—”

“The boy and that machine, baji-naji, the delight of his days!” The bus jolted. Adigan caught himself by the overhead rail, at the same time making a grab to steady Bren, no slower than his bodyguard.

“Faster, Madi-ji! Will an Atageini driver lose us?”

Faster it was. The bus passed others, roaring off into the dark wherever there was an appearance of flat ground, finding its way over open meadow, hitting brush, then falling back into the column where it must, not giving up on the car, in no degree, only seeking a chance to get by. Another bus had swerved aside from the general column, veering into their path, and the driver honked vigorously, while Lord Adigan swore and waved as if the other driver could see his indignation.

“Now! Now!” he cried, and the bus veered far out and around.

They passed the second bus. And hit a depression at the bottom of the hill, a streambed. The bounce of stout shock absorbers nearly threw them all in a heap as they went over the bank. Water splashed up into the headlamps, splattered the windshield. Then they met the far bank, lurched up and over, and climbed, wheels laboring, then clawed their way up at an angle, until one and then the other wheel rolled over the crest. Banichi steadied both of them, and the Dur bodyguard had likewise stood up, prudently holding on, trying to urge their lord to safety.

“The fool!” Adigan cried, ignoring the guards, waving at the other bus, now behind them.

“Best sit down, Bren-ji,” Banichi said quietly—in point of fact, Bren had little to see at all past that wall of atevi, but a fleeting glimpse of that pair of taillights, like a ruddy will of the wisp, flitting ahead of them. Questions came from the rear of the bus, what was going on, were they under attack, had the brakes failed?

One was a high young voice, demanding information.

Adigan turned and shouted to his household and his provincials: “We are following a car in which the aiji-dowager has taken passage with the Atageini! That fool driver will never leave Dur in the dust!”

One certainly understood where Rejiri derived his notions. A cheer went up from the folk of Dur, a general approbation of their lord’s defiance, and in that commotion Bren began to find his way back to his seat.

“The paidhi-aiji is with us,” Dur shouted out, “and the young heir of Tabini-aiji!”

“Hai!” the cheer went up, to a man.

Well, it was something, being cheered by an allied clan that still owned itself allied, after all the troubles. It set a warmth into one’s bones.

“Thank you, Dur!” Cajeiri waved his arms above adult heads, in mid-aisle, silhouetted in the glare of headlamps behind them. He had a sure grasp of politics, even at his age.

“Hai for Dur!” his young escort yelled out, everyone congratulating everyone else, while Adigan’s bus driver fought manfully not to be wrecked or overset, and Bren clawed his way past and into his seat. Cajeiri hung onto the seat back rail to cheer with his young bodyguard, and the bus bounced and lurched. Their objective, meanwhile, was nimbly eluding them, and they had not even made the train station, let alone Shejidan.

But they were still in pursuit.

If our transmission holds up, Bren said to himself, bracing himself at an angle between the wall and the seat ahead of him.

They were going to die in a bus wreck, never mind enemy fire, and it was his fault for suggesting they give chasec But they could not let Ilisidi go commit suicide alone, could they?

He knew the dowager’s ways, her absolutely outrageous ways, and in his mind, she was likely challenging the Kadagidi in that open car for a reason—her popularity—her absolute idolized status in the east. Let the aiji-dowager die in an outrageously heroic action against Murini and the whole east would blow up, that was what she was about. He could think of half a dozen eastern lords who would break from any western hold over them if Murini was remotely shown to have targeted her. He could think of a dozen more lords in the midcontinent that would become untrustworthy if the far east ever broke away from the aishidi’tat— The whole aishidi’tat would break apart, was what—shatter into a hundred rival states. Kill Ilisidi, and it guaranteed Murini would not be in charge when the kyo finally showed up in orbit, even if not a single member of Tabini’s household survived.

And if it did happen, if they failed in this mad venture, someone else would make a power grab, to be sure, name himself or herself aiji and cut Murini’s throat in the process—give it two weeks, at maximum.

Meanwhile Mospheira would lose no time stabilizing the situation by appointing Yolanda Mercheson his replacement. There was an idea worth staying alive to prevent.

And they had visitors coming in from space who expected to deal with a stable, reasonable authority down here.

God, if only Ilisidi had consulted him. He would have flung himself bodily in the way of her getting in that car. He would have argued with her that they—he, the dowager, and the heir—should run for it if Tabini had the notion of going back for a frontal assault on Shejidan. Run for the hills, hell. They should just go back to the coast, go to Mospheira, get back into space and use technological means, like a meaningful near-earth-orbit satellite system and broadcasts and even weapons they controlled, to become an unassailable nuisance to any usurper— But he hadn’t had a chance to pose that argument to her.

Security staffs had separated their assets, and right now there was no way in hell this overloaded bus was going to overtake that touring car on rough ground—not until their refueling, presumably at the train station.

Then he had to dive off this bus, try to get hold of the dowager and talk sense into her in precisely those terms—appealing to technology which she and her household could understand, alone of atevi within his reach.

If he could reason with her at all at this point. If she hadn’t taken some damned public stand from which she couldn’t back downc He would send Banichi to talk to Cenedi. That was the one agency that could persuade the dowager—get Cenedi to take his side. With reason. With logic. And a concrete plan.

First thing in the plan, they had to overtake that car.

The estate road joined the general provincial road at the southern estate gateway. The bus rolled through broad open gates, still not foremost among the buses that had set out— notably not the foremost, Bren thought, seeing how the lights went on up the curve their column made, and he would bet the dowager’s car was up in the lead by now. He heard the tinny radio advisements that someone near him, perhaps Dur’s security, picked up from other members of the column—it was, thank God, a verbal code that he could not penetrate, but then, blood-chilling, he heard a voice speaking clear Ragi: “The aiji-dowager has returned in triumph over foreign connivance and calls on every village to rise and take back Shejidan from the usurper! The aiji-dowager is at this moment on the move, with all the true numbers of the heavens in her hands! Rise up, arm, and join her! This is the fortunate moment!”

My God, my God, he thought, feeling that chill run down his back. She’s challenging Murini head-on, no question. She’s using Tatiseigi’s communications system. If that doesn’t bring airplanes down on us with bombs, nothing will. Does she want that?

If Tabini starts dropping those illegal gas-bombs himself, all restraint goes on their side and oursc but he’s the liberal: he can conceivably do things like that, can’t he? Murini, with his conservative claims—he can’t. He daren’t. And it’s exactly the sort of thing the dowager wouldn’t stick at, not in this situation, even if all hell breaks loose.

No phones at the station that will let me get through to Mospheira, no radio that won’t be monitored. Shawn can’t order an intervention without going to the legislature and the legislature won’t move in time. No way I can stop this, not once that call to the tashrid has gone public, and Mospheiran military intervention wouldn’t help Tabini’s cause, anyway.

We’re in it. We’re in it for sure.

He had his pistol in his pocket. Tano had told him he should take better care of it. Clean it more often. Truth was, he hated carrying it, hated thinking he had it, hated ever needing it, treasure it as he did because of the source from which it came. Now he thought he should follow Tano’s advice and clean the thing before he had to fire it, if he didn’t set it off by accident in all this bouncing about.

He didn’t have a cleaning kit. Needed a brush. He didn’t want to be handling it with the boy next to him.

He didn’t want it to fail him, either. He got up again, made his way as far as Algini’s seat, which he and Tano shared by turns, the bus having many more people than seats. “Gini-ji.” He passed Algini the weapon, holding on with his elbow around a pole. “This needs cleaning, if you would do me the kindness, Gini-ji.”

Algini took it, ejected the clip and the shell in chamber, not even thinking of the motion, one was sure. Natural as breathing. An occupation for his hands. And Bren took a less painful grip on the seat back railing, held on as the bus lurched and bounced.

“Is there a chance we may overtake the dowager at the refueling stop, Gini-ji? Is there a chance Banichi can reach Cenedi?”

“We shall see what we do there. We may lose certain vehicles, as this assemblage drinks the fuel up, nandi. It will be a difficult matter to get so many vehicles to the capital, all with fuel. And some will not withstand the trip, mechanically.”

Clearly they could go stringing dead vehicles and stranded people from here to Shejidan, and it was no good fate awaiting those thus stranded, if their advance failed or stalled. “One has had an unpleasant thought. What if they figure out our path, and start blowing the fueling stations in front of us, Gini-ji?”

“This is our gravest concern, nandi,” Algini said, and blew through the open barrel before he added. “Certain fast-moving private cars are going ahead of the column. We hope to take fuel stations in advance. We hope, too, that certain local folk in favor of us will think of our needs and guard their own premises from destruction, such as they can.”

“Against Guild?” Ordinary folk contesting the Assassins’ Guild seemed the weakest link in their whole plan, even ahead of the vulnerability of the fuel supply, and the sheer mass of all these hungry vehicles. It seemed uncharacteristically fragile, this threat they mounted, even with the support of lords and professional Guild: Most of their supporters were farmers and shopkeepers, completely untrained except in hunting. “They can stall us out, Gini-ji, can they not? They can strand us in the middle of the countryside.”

Algini rarely met a direct question, or returned a direct gaze from anyone. In the dark, fitfully lit by bouncing headlamps from other vehicles, he not only gazed back, but did so with uncommon earnestness. “That they can do, Bren-ji.”

“What, then, shall we do? Are we to fight, wherever we run out and stop? Or have we a plan to get to cover?”

“The vehicles of high priority will refuel more often than absolute need, and if we are stopped—indeed we may have to fight, nandi, but one trusts a number of measures are being taken in advance of us.”

Algini lapsed into the passive voice precisely where the critical who would logically be other Guild, as clearly as if he had shouted it. Guild or operatives of the aiji, which would still be Guild—were implied to be taking those measures, out in front of the column.

That answered his query as to whether the aiji and his supporters had taken leave of their senses.

“We killed the Guild officers, Gini-ji.” Implying that the rest of the Guild might not be favorable to such action, and fishing for information.

“We did,” Algini said, clearly unwilling to disburse too much information to anyone. And then he added: “But do not by any means take Gegini-nadi as the Guild, Bren-ji. He elected himself.”

Not Gegini-nandi, then, no title so high accorded to the Guildmaster who had walked into Tatiseigi’s sitting room and started laying down the law. The late Gegini-nadi, then, and his associates were no longer an issue in this action, or not an active one. Algini hinted there was no majority behind him, and did not think that the Guild as a whole would be too disturbed.

And Algini, their demolitions man, Bren suddenly suspected, had been intimately involved in taking them out.

Never the most forward of his staff, Algini. Always quiet, always ready to slip into the background. In Algini’s Guild, the thought suddenly struck him, one never sought publicity, one never discussed Guild affairs, one never gave up one’s secrets, not even to one’s closest non-Guild associates.

Perhaps, dared one think, not even to other Guildsmen?

And that dark thought having struck him, he looked down at Algini’s light-limned features, so tranquil a face, and he wondered what Algini actually was within this most secretive of all Guilds.

Granted Banichi and Jago had come from Tabini’s staff— exactly what agency had lent him Tano and Algini? And why, after all these years, did he know so little of Algini’s opinions?

Curious thought to have occured to him, bouncing along in the dark, face to face with Algini over a piece of enigma Algini politely—and correctly—declined to discuss. It was an embarrassing position, having asked questions, having gotten another, deeper enigma back.

And why? Why did Algini tell him as much as he had, after years of no information? It seemed maybe a direct hint to a very dim-brained human, a human with non-atevi wiring, that there was something else going on—the sort of hint Algini had never been the one to give, because the dim-brained human had always been Jago’s and Banichi’s responsibility.

But one knew that the connections that wove the great houses into associations were not all lines of marriage. The passing of staff from one house to another, even the less social act of spying on one’s neighbors, was an important surety between houses.

Verification meant honesty, behavior-as-advertised, creating trust between houses whose relationships spanned not just individual promises, but generations. Banichi and Jago had continually reported to Tabini, he was very sure, so long as they were neighbors within the Bu-javid. His cook Bindanda he knew reported constantly to Tatiseigi and his housekeeper likewise, making sure the paidhi pulled no humanish chicanery.

While Tatiseigi—being a key lord of the Padi Valley— Had Tatiseigi’s checking up on the paidhi’s household also been Tatiseigi’s way of checking up on Tabini’s behavior—a Ragi lord with an unprecedented lot of power, and married to an Atageini woman?

Perhaps his welcome in Tatiseigi’s house would have been better this time had he brought Bindanda with him. He had never been asked about Bindanda’s absence. It was hardly the sort of thing the old man could have asked himc Welcome, nandi, and where is my chief spy? If his brain had had atevi wiring, he might have had the basic cleverness to drop the information unasked, gracefully, without quite making it a challengec But nothing answered the essential question of why his staff on such short notice had felt entitled to blow the hell out of the Atageini premises and take out the self-proclaimed Guild officers on their own. The aiji’s staff should have been the ones to move—and he had the most uneasy feeling that Ismini hadn’t been involved; that Ismini hadn’t been consulted in the operation at all.

Do not take Gegini-nadi as the Guild, Bren-ji.

In a tone downright proprietary and prideful, as if Algini had a personal ax to grind in the removal of their visitor, as if he had conceived a personal offense in the shift of his Guild onto Murini’s side.

The old Guildmaster might be alive or dead at the moment. One had no idea what was going on in the Guildhouse, and one never knew.

But, in the way of atevi politics, not all the old Guildmaster’s personal operatives would be dead—the same as when a lord went down by assassination, there was always the chance of one or two still in the field whose man’chi might lead them to act.

And one doubted any such operatives would feel any man’chi at all toward someone Algini called self-appointed, a usurper of the Guild’s highest authority—possibly even the murderer of the Guildmaster, if the man had met his end.

And if such agents were still in the field, still where the old Guildmaster had placed them, where were they?

Had, for instance, Guild operatives been inserted in his house, a means of the Guild checking up on Tabini as well as the human official who was that close to Tabini’s ear? It certainly made sense that if he had an assortment of agents on his staff from the Ragi, from the Atageini, and a dozen other lords all watching him, the Guild not sending someone of their own would be odd, would it not?

They would move through channels that already had access. They would maneuver to get someone ideally not on domestic staff, who would not accompany the paidhi everywhere, at every moment, but into his security, which was only four people, two of whom he knew very closelyc two of whom found it so, so difficult to call him by anything but his proper titles, until very, very latelyc God, what a string of chilly perhapses!

“Here, nandi.” Algini handed him back the pistol, cleaned and reloaded.“You should get a holster for it.”

“I shall,” he said, feeling the air he breathed had gone a little rare. He tucked the heavy object into his coat pocket. “As soon as I find the opportunity, Gini-ji. Your advice and Tano’s, both, and one does take it to heart. But one still hopes we shall get through this without my ever needing it.”

“Stay behind us,” Tano said, out of the dark above his head. “And stay down. You shine in the dark, Bren-ji, and we are not facing farmer-folk, not in this action.”

“Yes,” he said, the way one took an order. He had been glad of the darker coat: Guild opposition would not hesitate to target any lord on their side, with the human one a priority, no question. But Tano’s jacket crushed him with its weight. He found the occasion to shed the jacket, and hung it on the seat back, the night air welcome relief. “With gratitude, Tano-nadi. I shall stay out of view, one promises, most earnestly. Take it. Take it.”

“Do,” Algini said, just that, and quietly, efficiently, Tano shrugged it on, a more potent defense to him and his than the jacket itself posed.

With that thought, he took himself, his fair skin, his light coat, his newly-cleaned pistol, and his surmises back to his own seat, where Cajeiri was kneeling backward, talking with Jegari and Antaro.

“Is there news?” Cajeiri asked.

News.

There was plenty of guesswork, was what there was in the paidhi’s mind at the moment, a good many scary surmises, none of them fit for youngsters’ gossip.

“We shall stay close behind your great-grandmother’s car, is all.”

The bus gave a violent lurch, scraped through brush, and then seemed to have gone onto a road. Bren caught a look outside the window, and suddenly they were blazing along a dedicated roadway, throwing gravel from the tires. “One understands we are going to the rail station,” he said to the young people. “That being the nearest fuel stop on our way. If your great-grandmother fails to stop there, one hopes we will have enough fuel to follow them to the next such place.”

“We shall find them. We shall persuade mani-ma to get onto the bus,” Cajeiri said. “And Lord Tatiseigi and Cenedi, too, and Nawari and all of them. The car can go on and be a decoy.” The boy had learned that tactic on the ship, under circumstances in which no boy his age ought to have to learn his lessons. “But she will be very stubborn about it, nandi. You can persuade her.”

“She is likely to be that, young sir,” he said, as the bus swerved around a turn, top-heavy and slewing alarmingly. “And one greatly doubts she will listen to the paidhi, either. But I shall ask Banichi to talk to Cenedi.”

“And I shall!”

“You,” he said, “will stay on the bus, young sir!”

Arms folded. Cajeiri sulked, an eight-year-old again.

Up hills and down, and onto the flat again, as fast as they could go. They were not quite foremost in the column now, but they were close, only a handful of trucks and cars still kicking up a cloud of headlamp-lit dust in the sandy spots ahead of them. Tatiseigi’s car was in the lead of the whole column, one was quite sure, and it was beyond any doubt a far more modern car than the one in which Tatiseigi had first met them, a light and maneverable vehicle with good suspension.

One could hardly say the same for the bus they were riding. It slewed and rocked alarmingly, the driver taking wild turns to avoid major obstacles, and as they pitched wildly along the side of a drainage ditch, Bren braced a foot against the seat in front, of him against the chance they were going over at any moment.

Cajeiri imitated his stance, excited out of his mood, taking delight in the swerves. “The driver is going very fast, nandi!”

“Indeed,” Bren said, all the while hoping that if they did overset, it would not be on some steep hillside or into large rocks.

Up and over the hills, it was, and through woods that might mask Kadagidi ambush, branches raking the top of the bus. By now Bren had gathered half a dozen bruises on the side facing the window, and Cajeiri, laughing, caught him when his foot slipped and he all but dashed his face against the seat in front of him.

“One is grateful, young sir.” He righted himself and took a grip on the seat back with his hand. They had swerved onto a stretch of gravel, actually keeping on the road all the way through the woods, the tail of the bus tending to slew somewhat on the turns. Then, with a last such skid, they definitively left the trees, and turned what Bren calculated was due west, and not that far from the rail station.

People standing in the aisle had crowded forward, blocking his view. There seemed some discussion in progress between Dur and the driver—he had no idea what the subject was, but the bus was already going at a reckless pace, and now the driver added speed.

Then a set of red gleams lit the crowd in silhouette: tail-lights from the several vehicles in front. Braking.

Jago worked her way up against his seat. “We are coming to the station now,” she said. “There will be a delay here, and we will try to find the car. We will force our way in as far as possible, but there is no surety the car will stop. It has a fair-sized tank, and utmost priority at the pump, if it does. We do not wish to discuss matters with the others on the radio. Banichi is going out when we get to the pump.”

He didn’t like the notion of Banichi leaving them. He didn’t like the odds the car might have kept going, with some destination of its own in mind, and, as Jago said, no recourse to radio possible.

Damn.

But Jago had immediately gone forward again, and the bus, moving more sanely behind the other vehicles, hit a much smoother track, still rolling through an enveloping cloud of dust that lights coming up behind them rendered entirely opaque. There was sand under the wheels now—there had been a lot of that around the train station, a typically soft surface for a fairly major road. If the driver could see anything at the moment but the taillights of the vehicle immediately in front, he would be surprised.

“Great-grandmother has a better driver,” Cajeiri commented glumly, which was not precisely fair to the driver they had, but it added up to the truth.

Buildings appeared through the haze. More red lights ahead of them. Red light and the hazy headlamps of vehicles behind them lit the interior of the bus as they slowed to an absolute stop near those ghostly buildings, and then their forward door opened. Several people got out of their bus, some likely to go investigate the fuel supply or consult the drivers in front of them, or argue their precedence in getting to what would surely be one fuel pump.

And Banichi, trying to locate the car among these buses.

“Are we looking for mani-ma?” Cajeiri asked, as his young bodyguard leaned over the seat to hear.

“One hopes so, young gentleman. We have reached the train station and no one has shot at us. This is good.”

“Guild would have been ahead of us, nandi,” Cajeiri said with a wave of his hand, “and taken care of any problems. Cenedi would see to that, too.”

“He would certainly do that,” Bren agreed. “But we do not take for granted we are safe here, young sir.”

Damned sure he didn’t. Cenedi might be out there somewhere.

Banichi was. But his view of seats in that car indicated Cenedi was the only one of her staff with her. He hoped Nawari at least was somewhere close in the uncertainty of this blinding dust and dark, and that she was not totally reliant on the competency of Tatiseigi’s long-suffering staff.

And, in the matter of unreliable staff, God knew where Ismini was at the moment. Certainly there was no room in the plane for more than three, if that, with the fuel bombs: Tabini, Rejiri, and someone. If the aiji’s bodyguard was cut loose to operate, they would not be happy about it, they were ignobly set on a bus somewhere in this mess, and whether they were reliable in man’chi or whether they were in fact gone soft—that lot, with or without Ismini, would be up ahead of the column, no question, demanding precedence for themselves, maybe in a position to move near the dowager, who knew? The whole train of thought made him extremely uneasy.

Their personnel—he thought it might be Banichi with them—reboarded the bus. The door shut, and the bus rolled slowly into a turn that led it on an extreme tilt along the margin of the road, passing other vehicles. Cajeiri gave a bounce in his seat.

Had it been Banichi? Or was he still out there?

“So have they found her? Are we going to the head of the line?”

As the universe ought to be ordered, in Cajeiri’s intentions, indeed. And it had not been Banichi boarding. They were moving up to fuel. They negotiated their way past ten to fifteen vehicles, including three cars, and made it to the single pump, where they stopped. The door opened. Several of their people got off to attend the mechanics of it. But there was no car.

Cajeiri immediately got up and began to force his way through the aisle. Bren flung himself out of his seat and caught the princely arm, only marginally ahead of Jegari and Antaro.

“The young gentleman should by no means get off the bus,” Bren said.

“We were not getting off,” Cajeiri said, indignantly freeing himself, and simultaneously managing a look out the other window.

“We are looking for great-grandmother out the front window. It is our right! And Jegari will go.”

“Jegari will not go,” Bren said, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “By no means. Banichi will be out there talking to Cenedi, if the dowager is here, and that is quite sufficient. A young man could as easily be left behind by accident, and this is no safe place to be walking about, young sir, not for you nor for your staff.”

The fuel cap was off, a great deal of clatter at the rear. He heard the nozzle go in, he thought, hoped they were fueling apace by now.

Adult privilege, he worked his own way forward to see what there was to see up by the door.

There Tano found him, in the press in the aisle. “The dowager has fueled and gone ahead,” was Tano’s unwelcome news. “It would be foolish not to top off fuel now that we are stopped, nandi. We do not know what the way ahead may present us. But we do have this station secure, and a team has gone up the line by rail to control the switching point up by Coagi. No train coming from Shejidan will get past that barrier.”

That was good news. The rail would be physically shunted over to divert any train coming toward them out of the south, not only from the direction of Shejidan, but, the way the rail lines branched, out of the extreme south, where Murini’s strongest support lay. And any such hostile train, once stopped, would be boarded and dealt with, no question.

“More,” Tano said, “we have been given maps of where more widely scattered fuel can be had, and they are passing these to the column. Certain of the rearmost of this column will fan out from here and use farm tanks and rejoin our route later. More are coming in to join us.”

“Do you know whether the Kadagidi are coming, Tano-ji?” Bren asked. “Will they attack Tirnamardi, or come after us?”

“They will not attack an empty house,” Tano answered him, confirming his own opinion. “But they have not been as forward to attack us as one might expect, nandi. And we have passed word of our movement to Guild in the capital.”

How? And meaning what? Bren asked himself, his heart skipping a beat. “To Guild officials?” he asked. “We blew up their leader, did we not? Forgive me, Tano-ji.” The last, because Guild affairs had fairly well spilled out of him, asking what he should by no means ask.

“We have advised certain Guild members, nandi. Forgive me.”

The radio was active again, a faint tinny voice to the rear. Tano ducked away through the press in the aisle, having given his question a broader answer, one was sure, than most lords would get regarding a dispute within the Guild, and it came from a source that recent suspicion informed him might itself be somewhat—almost—nearly—official.

Cajeiri, appearing at his elbow, where he should not be, had just asked him a question. He was not sure what it had been, something about Murini. “One has no idea, young sir.”

“But,” Cajeiri said, and pursued the question.

“One has no idea,” he repeated, tracking the noise of the radio, but unable to hear the transmission. Tano was back there, near it.

Meanwhile he worked his way back to his seat, entraining Cajeiri behind him, and burdened with the thought that if Algini and Tano were more than Guild members, this ungainly bus might itself be a higher-level target than he had imagined, a traveling Guild office— They hadn’t contacted Guild offices in Shejidan, Tano had said, but certain Guild members.

So communications were functioning, maybe including Tatiseigi’s leaky communications system, which Ilisidi was using with abandon, alerting the whole reception area. They were not isolated.

They had control of the railroad switching point at Coagi. They had maps, had support in the countryside, and the means to route their hindmost vehicles to alternative fueling sites: farm tanks, village stations, all sorts of hitherto unimagined sources.

He sat down in his own seat, dazed by the number of vectors this business was taking, trying to think of anything he could personally do. Cajeiri plumped down beside him.

“We must have a very large fuel tank, nand’ Bren.”

“That we do, young sir.”

“How much fuel does this pump have in it?”

“One has no idea, young sir. The tank itself is underground. A very large tank, one hopes.”

“Like the one at Uncle Tatiseigi’s house.”

“Yes.” His mind was skittering off ahead of the moment, toward the rolling countryside around Shejidan, the scores of towns and villages in the most populated area of the country. Roads were not the rule on the mainland. Vehicular traffic did not go town to town; it went, generally, to rail stations, taking merchandise to market, people to passenger stations, and that webwork of small lanes knit the villages together in the process. One wanted to visit a neighboring town? One hitched a ride with a commercial truck or the local village bus on its way to the train station, as they had done. People didn’t ordinarily even think in terms of driving to the capital: Rail carried absolutely everything, goods and people alike.

But the web of roads grew and linked villages, lumpy, bumpy, and gravel in most instances, tire tracks through meadow in others, even in areas where buses ran once a week.

The sheer novelty of vehicles massing and converging along that network of roads, natural as it might be to human culture, might well be utterly off the map of Murini’s expectations, and carry them farther than any assault by rail—if they just took to rail from here, Murini might have cut them off by tearing up track. If they had trusted only to rail, Murini might have picked up the telephone to learn just where they were, and where to stop them. But there were hundreds of village overland routes, through meadows, through woods, and along village centers—across small bridges they could only hope held up, once they reached the stream-crossed meadows near the capital. And their mass could spread out and reform, down this web, taking fuel at farms, gathering strength, Tano had said, and regrouping. Meanwhile their forces were penetrating the rail system, taking switch-points, guaranteeing Murini couldn’t use that system.

Sheer audacity might carry them through the night, might get them a fair distance before Murini figured out what was happening and decided how to stop this assault.

And more villages might come in along the way. If there was any district in the aishidi’tat that had little reason to support Murini, it was that stretch of Ragi ethnicity that bordered Murini’s Padi Valley, from Taiben to the Shejidan countryside. The feud between Tatiseigi of the Atageini and Taiben was only a fractional part of that old rivalry. The Ragi atevi of Shejidan could not be content with some Kadagidi upstart from the Padi Valley suddenly claiming to rule the aishidi’tat, with his accent, his traditions, his history of skipping from side to side of previous coup attempts, as Murini had notoriously done. There was no reason in the world that Shejidan district should rise up to defend any Padi-born ruler.

Rush to arms en masse to overthrow authority? That was not the atevi style. But lend a slight helping hand to tip the balance in favor of a Ragi prince while professional Guild sorted out their internal struggle?

That would start a chain reaction of minor disobedience that might become an avalanche. It had started, when a few brave members of the tashrid had decided to get contagiously ill at Murini’s summons. Had they known where Tabini was when they did it? Had they signaled their support through the Ajuri lord?

Now, when it looked as if the whole Padi Valley except the Kadagidi was coming in to support the father of a prince of mingled Valley and Ragi heritage, it remained to be seen whether the tashrid would still sit at home with sore throat or answer Tabini’s summons to assemble a quorum. Now that the dowager was back from space, Tabini could provide the aishidi’tat his evidence—never mind the economic mess the paidhi had counseled Tabini-aiji into, the advice that had started this mess. Now it was apparent that an upstart Padi Valley lord, in a bloody overthrow of the existing order, had taken his primary support from the detested south—that would never sit well with the Sheijidan Ragi or the Taibeni, under the most favorable of circumstances, once it became clear to them.

Murini’s seizure of power might have gotten their acquiescence early on, when it had seemed part of a general tilt of the whole Association away from Tabini’s policies and toward a restoration of things-as-they-had-been, but once the Padi Valley peeled away from the Kadagidi, led by the Atageini, and once the Taibeni Ragi joined them, and once the mixed-blood prince came home from space, along with Ilisidi, she of the eastern connections, then, God, yes, the whole picture had changed. The north had repudiated Murini.

The islands had repudiated him, in the person of Dur. The coast, under Geigi, had never supported Murini at all. The east had never been anyone’s but Ilisidi’s.

Now the very center of the Association, the Padi Valley and Ragi highlands districts, had turned soft—turned soft, hell, they were in full career toward Sheijidan to make their opinions heard: there would be the dicey part. Loss of the center and the east of the aishidi’tat left Murini clinging only to the south and his own Padi Valley clan, which was now itself isolated in its violation of neighboring Atageini territory— Murini was in deep trouble. That exhilarating chain of assessments dimmed all the world around him, leaving vague just what anyone was going to do to reunite the individual pieces of this avalanche into a stable structure. The avalanche was pouring down toward the capital. Murini would have increasing trouble mustering any support whatever, and the self-appointed Guild head who had entered Tatiseigi’s estate to bring their agents in position for a surgical strike had done so perhaps foreseeing that the gathering would move on the capital and that only taking out Tabini could stop it without shattering the aishidi’tat beyond repair.

Now that man was dead, along with, one hoped, every agent he had brought with him.

Nasty thought—that there might be other agents scattered through the buses, maybe on this bus, still intent on stopping them.

Presumably, however, the lord of Dur knew his own and Banichi and Jago could vouch for any others. That might not be the case on more motley vehicles, those that had piled on people from various villages.

The thought drove him up from his seat again, pressing past a bemused Cajeiri, to find Tano, where he had gone.

“One had a thought, Tano-ji, that perhaps on some of the trucks, some of the Guild operatives might still pose a threat.”

“There are cautions out, nandi,” Tano informed him. “One has advised other buses to take careful account of passengers and quietly report any suspicions at the next fueling stop. Rely on us.”

“You heard the radio operating,” he said. “You know the dowager is using it.”

“One has heard,” Tano said.

The bus engine coughed to life. They started to roll. Those of their people who had been outside scrambled aboard as the bus moved, and the doors shut. One hoped Banichi had made it. One saw a tall man talking to the driver, and to Lord Adigan, silhouetted against the light outside.

He went back to his seat as the bus rocked onto level road, eased past, and dropped into it.

“How far can we go on a single tank, nand’ paidhi?” Cajeiri asked him.

“One assumes a very large tank, could now that it is full, take even this vehicle most of the way to Shejidan.”

“See?” Cajeiri bounced to his knees, his whole human-adult-sized body impelled to impose itself over the seat back, to win a bet, one supposed, with his bodyguard. “We can get most of the way there on one tank.”

“The lord did not say ‘all the way,’ ” Jegari retorted; the debate continued and the paidhi, who had other concerns on his mind, thought about going back and taking Tano’s seat by Algini, where there was quiet.

“How much of the way?” Cajeiri asked him, quite familiarly and quite rudely abrupt, as happened.

“What would your great-grandmother say, young sir?”

“Nandi,” came the amendment.

“Indeed, young sir. But I have no precise answer for your question. Excuse me.”

He gathered himself up and slipped back into the aisle, an escape from innocence and good humor. It was Banichi’s and Jago’s company he wanted at the moment, and information, information of any sort, as much as he could get.

He found them together, up by the large front windows. The view was of dust-veiled taillights, not so many of them as before, and the bus shot along a gravel road, throwing rocks and receiving them in equal number. The windshield had taken several hits, and had lost chips.

He came armed with the youngsters’ question. “Can we make it to Shejidan, Banichi-ji, on what fuel we have?”

“Possibly so, Bren-ji. We only topped off, is that not the expression?”

“How is the dowager faring? Did you hear?”

“There was no opportunity to overtake her, Bren-ji,” Jago said.

“So we hear, Tatiseigi has taken the loan of that automobile from the mayor of Diegi, who has habitually driven to and from the trains in a notoriously reckless rush. Murini, with the fuel shortage, has forbidden the driving of such private cars. The mayor is delighted to lend it in this cause, and accompanies them, personally.”

One seat given up to another non-Guild. So only Cenedi was with them, give or take the man riding with the driver.

And a fuel shortage at the pumps, which meant chancier supply for their convoy. Nothing had been working right, in this anti-technology reversal of policiesc in the flight, as they had begun to hear, of certain notoriously human-influenced, technologically-skilled occupation classes into obscurity and inaction.

So town lords, on their way to the capital to answer calls to the legislature, had evidently been compelled to take the usual truck or bus to the stations. And Lord Tatiseigi’s coming to meet them in his elegant automobile that night had itself been a political gesture, it now seemed, a gallant statement, if they had been aware how to read it. The old lord had had a touch of the rebel about him from the start, downright daring in his reception of the dowager and the heir, and in the style of it. One might somewhat have misjudged himc failed to realize how deeply Murini had offended the old man.

Or how strongly the old man was inclined to commit to the dowager. There was a thought.

Subcurrents. Implication and insinuation and hint. He was back on the continent, for sure. He clung to the upright bar against the chance of a hole in the road and asked himself how far he had gotten out of touch with the pulse of the mainland— of the whole planet—during his absence. So much hardship, so many lives impacted— A rock hit the windshield. His imagination made it a bullet for a split second, and he flung himself back, bumped into Banichi, who steadied him on his feet.

“We are not yet under attack,” Banichi assured him, releasing him. “But we shall be. Best rest while you can.”

“Next to the young gentleman?” Bren asked, resolved on remaining where he was, and drew a quiet laugh from his bodyguard.

“Indeed,” Jago agreed, and for several moments the cloud of dust sparked with taillights was all their reality, the bus going blindly behind the others.

“Someone has gone off in the ditch,” he realized, as they passed a bus pitched over beside the road, nose canted down in the drainage ditch. Their bus whipped past and kept going.

“The hindmost will help pull them out,” Jago surmised, which was the only reasonable help: They could not stop the whole column behind them to render aid, and it had not been the dowager’s car in the ditch, which alone would have gotten their attention. Their bus bucketed along, itself swerving violently as the road turned for no apparent reason—one such turn had betrayed the vehicle now well behind them.

The progress became a hypnotic blur of headlamp-lit dust and sways and bumps, the driver working the wheel furiously at times to keep them on track, the engine groaning intermittently to get them up over a hill. Then they would careen downward, keeping their spacing from other lights, the whole rushing along at all the speed they dared.

No telling what Tatiseigi’s driver had achieved, or how far in the lead they were. They passed a small truck that had pulled over. The passengers were gathered out in front of it with the hood thrown up, attempting to find some problem in the steaming engine. And it was gone in the night. Machines that had never driven farther than the local market were pressed to do the extraordinary, and they passed a large market truck, this one with a flat tire. The passengers held out hands, appealing for a ride, but their bus was already more crowded than afforded good standing room.

“We cannot take them on,” the lord of Dur said, in Bren’s hearing. “We are charged to overtake the dowager. We have the heir and the paidhi aboard. Someone will take them.”

The scene whipped past them, and was gone.

7

Another low range of hills, another diversion to the east, as the driver spun the wheel wildly. One of Dur’s men held a flashlight to a map and shouted instructions into the man’s ear the while.

Intersections with other country lanes went past, and Bren found a small place to sit on the interior steps by the door, down next to Banichi’s feet, seeking to relieve his knees.

“No, the paidhi is quite well, young sir,” he heard Jago say. “He is trying to sleep at the moment.”

Not precisely true. He heard his young companions had come looking for him, or Cajeiri had, personally, and he did not lift his head from his knees, while the rumble of bus tires over gravel made a steady, numbing din at this range. The door had three slit windows, and he could make out brush.

Perhaps he did sleep, in that position. He waked with a squeal of brakes and a rattle of gunfire, that sound he had heard all too often.

“Banichi-ji,” he exclaimed, and started to get up, but Banichi’s large hand on his head shoved him right back down. A little rattle became a barrage, and he sat, crushed by his bodyguard. Banichi and Jago were keeping low, everyone ducked down. Something cracked through the windshield, but the bus kept going, and then someone toward the righthand rear of their bus must have had a window slid back, because someone inside their bus let off a full clip. The bus never slowed. He heard Dur exhorting his bodyguard to shield their driver.

Damn, he said to himself, crouching there, thinking of that vulnerable, open car ahead of them.

“Cajeiri!” he heard Banichi say, then; and Jago’s weight left him.

With the worst of thoughts, Bren heaved himself up and scrambled through a press of atevi who tried to give him space.

Cajeiri was on his knees in the seat, he and his young guards, struggling to lift the window they themselves had dropped. Banichi leaned across and did it one-handed.

“What are you doing?” Banichi challenged them.

“There was a flash in the woods, nadi!” This from Antaro, defending her young lord. “We were shooting at that!”

“We?” They were all exposed to the night, but the spot which had roused their alarm was long past in the dark: The bus had sped off at the column’s speed. “Your task,” Banichi said in that dreadful voice he could use, “your task, young woman, is to protect your lord, which may require your flinging him to the floor, not abetting his youthful misjudgement.”

“Yes,” Jegari said.

There was a draft still coming in, a hole in that window, difficult to see in the dark. A bullet had gone through, and missed. Bren spotted it. He was sure Banichi already had.

And Ilisidi and Tatiseigi in that open car, Bren thought with a chill.

Whoever had shot at the column had fired blindly—which argued non-Guild forces, maybe Kadagidi coming crosscountry, having learned they were no longer at Tirnamardi. In the latter case, the attackers surely had no way of knowing they had had the heir in their sights— Or they were Guild, Bren said to himself, and had tried an impossible shot.

Which the fool youngsters had tried to return, and never mind Antaro had used the indefinite, child’s we, the child’s language which she had doubtless left behind entirely seven years ago, Banichi and Jago and everyone else in hearing had to be sure who had drawn a gun and not ducked his vulnerable head—damn, one could be sure of it.

“Keep your heads down, and rest,” Bren suggested, employing the fortunate three-mode. “We shall all have to sleep an hour or so, no matter they shoot at us. I shall sit with you.”

Which probably did not please his staff, but his backside was numb from the chill of the deck, and he slid past Cajeiri and took his former place, by the window. He took out his handkerchief—a gentleman had a handkerchief—and stuffed that white object in the bullet hole, high up. Well enough, he thought. A sniper might take that pallor for a targetc above their heads.

“Nandi,” Jago said, she and Banichi taking their leave, moving back to their former position, they and Tano and Algini, who had held the curious back. The aisle in their vicinity cleared, people getting back to their seats.

It was the moment in which an adult might have a word with a foolish young lad, and his desperately inexperienced staff. One prudently declined, letting them think about it, think about the dangers out there.

Young nerves had clearly had enough for the moment. Cajeiri had turned about in his seat, trying to find a comfortable place. He tried turning his head away, pretending to go back to sleep, but in lengthy silence, the bus bumping and thumping at its high speed, he ended up turning over, and finally sliding against Bren’s shoulder, exhausted.

Fair enough. Bren provided a shoulder, the weight was warm and provided a brace against which Bren himself could lean, the bus wall being cold and all too vulnerable. Bren found himself able to shut his eyes, even to drift a bit, in an interval of relatively smooth road and dark.

The bus jolted. Brakes wheezed. Refueling stop, Bren decided, at once aware that there was light outside the window. He began to think about getting up and finding out where they were.

Suddenly the bus roared off in a scattering of gravel, making no stop at all.

Cajeiri lifted his weight from Bren’s shoulder, braced himself with a hand on the seat in front. “What was that, nandi?” he asked.

“What are we doing?”

“One has no idea,” Bren said, and hauled himself to his feet and past the boy, in search of information, in what was near dawn.

Details hung in a dim gray light, where before had been dark and silhouettes, and faces were weary and watchful, facing the windows.

Tano was the one of his staff closest by, he and Algini having traded off their seats to Banichi and Jago. He took a grip on Tano’s seat rail.

“What happened, nadiin-ji?” Bren asked.

“An isolated station, nandi. The pumps are booby-trapped. A team is working to clear it, for the hindmost. Our driver believes we can make it—if not, still to another pump, with a small detour.”

Communications must still be working. They had hardly slowed down to find this out. “Is there word of the dowager?” he asked them, “Or the aiji?”

“There is not, Bren-ji. But we have not passed the car, either, baji-naji.”

“What shall we do, then? Drive straight into the city?”

“Perhaps,” Tano said. “Perhaps, Bren-ji.”

Perhaps, if the fuel held out in sufficiency to keep the column together. If, baji-naji, the buses held together mechanically and they didn’t run head-on into ambush. Worse, they were going into a narrowing cone on the map, making it clearer and clearer to anyone that the city was their destination, and offering ample time for their enemy to put up a meaningful roadblock and a determined resistence.

He worked forward in the crowded aisle to have a look ahead for himself, and had an uncommonly clear view of the column in front, no longer a dust-obscured scatter of taillights, but a gray string of five small trucks and one bus stretching ahead of them down a hill, on a well-traveled market road. No car. No hint of a car aheadc whatever that meant. One hoped it meant that the dowager had gone off the route and tried some clever maneuver. It was no good asking. Whatever they got by radio—and it was even possible that his staff could reach Cenedi at short range—there was no news for him, or his staff would have waked him to inform him. Banichi and Jago were in a seat forward, themselves catching a few moments of sleep. He decided against interrupting that rest.

He went back to his seat, answered Cajeiri’s sleepy questions—the boy had finally, absolutely run out of energy—and when Cajeiri dropped off again, he watched out the window, watched grain fields pass, finally making a pillow of his hand against the outer wall and catching a few hazy moments of sleep.

Then the tires hit pavement. He jerked his head up, saw buildings, realized they were passing right through a town—a town he knew, by that remarkable red building on the hill, the old fortress. It was Adigian, firmly in Ragi territory.

And it was sunrise, and people were out on the roadside waving at them, cheering them on, some of them with weapons evident.

Cajeiri’s head popped up. “There are people, nandi!”

“Adigian. A Ragi town. Wave at them, young gentleman.”

Cajeiri did that, but soon they ran out of people, and only saw three trucks waiting in a side street, trucks crammed with passengers, a sight that whisked by them.

More would join them, had his bodyguard not said so?

His nerves were rattled. As the last of the little town whisked past the windows he found another priority. The bus had what genteel folk called an accommodation in the rear, which he visited, and returned to his seat. The bus meanwhile kept up its steady pace, never slowing once, not as they left the brief patch of pavement and struck out on the usual dirt surface.

If there was fuel in Adigian, they had declined it, because the driver judged they had enough. Most everyone had waked, but now heads went down again. And amazing himself, he dropped his head over against the seat edge on folded hands and caught a little more half-sleep, his mind painting pictures of the space station over their heads, the white corridors of the remote station where they had fought to rescue the colonistsc so, so much detail the world didn’t know. He remembered a boy playing at race cars in the ship corridors, Banichi on his knees helping repair a wreckc all these things. A curious dinner, with floating globes of drink, and fear of poisonc Odd-smelling, dark halls, then, the interior of a kyo ship. The wide, strange countenance of their own kyo guest, his broad hand descending on a pile of teacakesc His head spun. There were so many changes, so much water under the bridge.

Adigian. Home territory, if he had a home anywhere besides that mountain over on Mospheira. The Ragi heart of the aishidi’tat.

For the first time since returning from space, even in his sojourn in Tirnamardi, he began to have a real sense of location, as if a missing true north had settled back into his bones and reached conscious level. He knew where he was with his eyes shut. Shejidan was there, just there, ahead of them, a little off dead-ahead, as the road wound. Remarkable, that he hadn’t had that awareness until now, that it had taken ancient Adigian and that old fortress to stir it.

Early evening on a rail trip, the train passing through the same town, himself on the way to Taiben, a guest of Tabini-aiji, all those years agoc Making notes for the University back on Mospheira, attempting a sketch of the fortress, since a camera would never be accepted in those long ago, nervous days of human-atevi relationsc back before the station had found new occupants, back before there was a space program, back before the paidhi had lived in the Bu-javid’s noble apartments.

In those days the aiji inviting a human guest to Taiben was itself unprecedented. Revolutionary.

Teaching him the use of a firearm, and giving him a small, concealable pistol, had been a thunderbolt. Defend yourself, had been Tabini’s implication, though at the time he had had no idea how imminent that necessity would be. It had not been a large gun: It was a small enough weapon to fit his hand, to fit very easily into his coat pocket—one of the concealed sorts that atevi maidservants might have tucked away when they only looked unarmed. Banichi had replaced it with another, slightly heavier, the night that he had arrived in Bren’s service, never to leave him.

Tabini had seen conflict coming, hadn’t he? The aiji had made his own decision to draw the paidhi into the thick of court activity, and gotten—oh, far more than Tabini had ever bargained for, that was probably the truth; but likewise Tabini had already known what he was going to ask for his people, hadn’t he? More technology, more change—he had never offered more than Tabini was willing to take, and use, and go with, clear to the stars, and to societal change, and technological revolution that did, in the end, exactly what paidhiin had been appointed to preventc Paidhiin had operated on the theory that technological revolution would be devastating to atevi culture, atevi society. That it would mean another war, with the destruction of Mospheira or of atevi, or both. Paidhiin had resided quietly, down among the secretaries of the Bu-javid, and made their dictionary, and consulted on every word, every concept, building notebooks ever so tightly restricted to certain aspects of the University and the State Department, which supervised them.

He had broken those ties years ago. He had become part of the court. He had all but renounced connections with Mospheira in the end.

And that town had turned out to cheer them—to cheer Tabini-aiji, not the Kadagidi—hadn’t they? They were Ragi. It was natural they’d be on Tabini’s side. But not, necessarily, on his. He had to remember that, and not expose himself to danger, not until he’d delivered the final load of information— things the Ragi atevi might not like to hear, but had to.

Turn in the road. He lifted his head, quite sure in his bones where they were, and dropped it back against his hands, then against the bus wall, Cajeiri sleeping soundly against his shoulder.

He saw a map in his mind, a map that showed him the countryside between Adigian and Shejidan, a region crisscrossed with small roads between villages, population quite concentrated in this region, and with many towns of size.

It was a place where, above all else, they had no wish to engage their enemy. Nor would their enemy wish to engage them, here, in the heartland of Tabini’s staunchest allies.

Had they seen the dowager? Was she all right? The boy was asleep again, against his shoulder. He had no wish to badger his staff with the unanswerable, when they were using their spare moments to think of details that might keep them alive.

Eyes shut. There was a period of dark, vaguely punctuated by potholes, turns, and once, the awareness of another episode of crowd noise, while the bus tires hummed over another stretch of concrete pavement.

Like going to the mountains over on Mospheira, that pavement sound.

Like holidays with his family, with Toby and his mother, he and his brother headed up the mountain to ski, their mother to soak up the fireside and a few drinks at the lodgec Squeal of brakes. Loss of momentum.

He waked.

They had come to a fueling station: He saw the pump, and the dusty gray back side of a rural co-op building, with a red tractor with a harrow sitting idle, a wagon nearby piled high with sacks probably of grain, a railway car on a siding, typical of such places.

A truck was ahead of them at the pump. It moved on. They moved on, pulling briskly up to that point. He scanned all about them for a car, for any hint of one. At the same time he heard the bus door open, then heard bumping and thumping about the outside of the bus.

That surely meant they had found fuel, and were taking it on—insurance, he said to himself muzzily, and the boy, exhausted, never woke, though there was a quiet exchange of surmises between Jegari and Antaro behind him.

He doggedly shut his eyes, thinking their calculations about fuel holding out had been wrong. They had diverted over to this other source. They were still considerably out from the city.

The bus started up again, its doors shut.

“The paidhi is asleep,” he heard Jago say, somewhere above him.

“Let him rest a little.”

He wanted to ask about the car, but they went away and he sank into spongy dark nowhere for an indeterminate time, before he realized the boy’s weight had paralyzed his shoulder and he was in pain.

He moved. He lifted his head. He saw countryside rushing by, above a cloud of dust. He saw a bus overcrowded, with weary passengers sitting on the outer arms of seats, or outright sitting in the aisle, asleep, it might be, while a handful stood near the driver.

It was the first time he had had a clear view out the opposite windows, and he saw a riverside, lined with small trees.

He shifted in his seat, chanced to wake the boy, who lifted his weight, blinked at the daylight, and asked where they were.

“Deep in Ragi countryside, young sir.” Bren rubbed his stubbled chin and got his razor from his kit, down between his feet, with his computer. The razor still had enough charge to shave with, and he did that, while Cajeiri visited the accommodation to the rear.

He was still shaving when the boy came back and sat down, and watched in curiosity.

“Can it grow as long as your hair, nandi?” the boy asked.

“It might, young sir. But one has no wish to scandalize the court.”

“Will you do it sometime?”

“What?”

“Grow it that long?”

“Much too uncomfortable, young sir. And not at all becoming.

And it grows just as slowly as hair on your head.”

“You would be as odd as the kyo.”

“That I might, young sir. But by no means as round.”

A laugh, a positive laugh on this chancy, desperate day. Cajeiri bounced onto his knees to see how his young bodyguard fared, the two of them having returned, one at a time, from their own visits to the accommodation. “Have we any breakfast?” he asked, and the two of them delved down into their gear and found grain and fruit bars.

“Would you like one, nandi?”

Now there was a good reason to have resourceful youngsters for company. He took the offering quite gratefully, tucked the razor back into his kit, and sat and ate slowly, finding it filled the empty spot in his belly.

All the while the land passed their windows, like a dream of places remembered. Not that far. Maybe half a day’s travel by these weaving roads, until Shejidanc Whatever that arrival brought them.

Algini came forward and spoke to the driver at one point, paused for a nod and a courtesy, and went back again, dislodging drowsing Dur fishermen the while. Then Banichi went back to Tano and Algini, while Jago talked to the driver, and then consulted the lord of Durc all of which seemed unusual, and perhaps indicative of communications flowing from some part of their caravan. Bren wanted to snag Banichi on his way back, but could find no way to do so without provoking a host of questions from the youngsters: Banichi was looking straight forward at the road visible through the front windshield, and seemed intent on business.

A conference ensued, Banichi with Jago, and then with the driver. Perhaps it was significant that they took a westerly tack at the next branching of the road—perhaps it was not. They bounced along, then hit gravel where another lane intersected.

“The other buses are not following, nandi,” Jegari said in alarm.

Bren turned in his seat, and indeed, the reasonably unobstructed view out the back windows showed the other vehicles going off down the road they had been on.

That was it. “Pardon, young sir.” Bren levered himself out of his window seat and, with stiffness in his legs, walked up to the front of the bus, where Banichi and Jago both stood on the internal steps, watching the road ahead.

They were on a downhill, and a train was stopped on the tracks in the middle of nowhere. A train with a handful of trucks and a couple of automobiles gathered beside it.

“What are we doing, nadiin-ji?” he asked, spotting those two cars with some hope. “We have left the column.”

“They will meet us,” Jago said. “We have other transport.”

The train, clearly. A diversion off their route. Switch and confuse, he had no trouble figuring that. And the cars.

It occurred to him, then, that there was a train station beneath the Bu-javid itself.

And the dowager must have communicated with them, because there was no one else with the brazen nerve to divert them to that route.

He drew a deep breath, already laying out in his mind what he was sure was the dowager’s plan of attack, telling himself the while that the dowager was stark raving mad. Having made herself a target all the way cross-country, now she was hijacking a passenger train—my God, he said to himself, relieved to think she was safe—and appalled to put the pieces together and guess what she was up to.

And all the while he had a longing vision of the hall outside his own apartment, his staff—his long-suffering staff, and Ilisidi’s.