In a courtyard echoing with shouts and the squeals of mecheiti, Nokhada extended a leg at his third request, mostly, Bren thought, because the last but her had already done the same.
He slithered down Nokhada’s sun-warmed side, and viewed with mistrust the mecheita’s bending her neck around and nibbling his sleeve, butting capped but still formidable tusks into his side as he tried to straighten the twisted rein. But he wasn’t so foolish as to press on Nokhada’s nose again, and Nokhada lifted her head, sniffing the air, a black mountain between him and the mid-morning sun, complaining at something unseen—or only liking the echoes of her own voice.
The handlers moved in to take the rein. He gave Nokhada a dismissing pat on the shoulder, figuring that was due. Nokhada made a rumbling sound, and ripped the rein from his hand, following the rest of the group the handlers were leading away into the maze of courtyards.
“Use her while you’re here,” Ilisidi said, near him. “At any time, at any hour. The stables have their instructions to accommodate the paidhi-aiji.”
“The dowager is very kind,” he said, wondering if there was skin left on his palm.
“Your seat is still doubtful,” she said, took her cane from an attendant and walked off toward the steps.
He took that for a dismissal.
But she stopped at the first step and looked back, leaning with both hands on her cane. “Tomorrow morning. Breakfast.” The cane stabbed the air between them. “No argument, nand’ paidhi. This is your host’s privilege.”
He bowed and followed Ilisidi up the steps in the general upward flow of her servants and her security, who probably overlapped such functions, like his own.
His lip was swollen, he had lost the outer layer of skin on his right hand, intimate regions of his person were sore and promising to get sorer, and by the dowager’s declaration, he was to come back for a second try tomorrow, a situation into which he seemed to have opened a door that couldn’t be shut again.
He followed all the way up the steps to the balcony of Ilisidi’s apartment, that being the only way up into the castle he knew, while the dowager, on her way into her inner apartments, paid not the least further attention to his being there—which was not the rudeness it would have been among humans: it only meant the aiji-dowager was disinterested to pursue business further with an inferior. At their disparity of rank she owed him nothing; and in that silence, he was free to go, unless some servant should deliver him some instruction to the contrary.
None did. He trailed through the dowager’s doorway, and on through the public reception areas of her apartment, tagged all the way by her lesser servants, who opened the outermost doors for him and bowed and wished him good fortune in his day as he left.
Good fortune, he wished them, in his turn, with appropriate nods and bows on their part, after which he trekked off down the halls, bruised and damaged, but with a knowledge now of the land, the provinces, the view and the command of the castle, and even what was the history and origin of the cannon he could see through the open front doors.
Where—God help him—several vehicles were parked.
Perhaps some official had come up from the township. Perhaps the promised repair crew had arrived and they were putting the electricity back in service. In any event, the paidhi wasn’t a presence most provincial atevi would take without flinching. He decided to hurry, and traversed the front room at a fast, sore-legged walk.
Straight into an inbound group of the castle staff and a flock of tourists.
A child screamed, and ducked behind its parents. Parents stood stock still, a black wall with wide yellow eyes. He made an apologetic and sweeping bow, and—it was the paidhi’s minimal job—knew he had to patch the damage, wild as he must look, with a cut lip, and dust on his coat.
“Welcome to Malguri,” he said. “I’d no idea there were visitors. Please reassure the young lady.” A pause for breath. A second bow. “The paidhi, Bren Cameron, at your kind disposal. May I do you any grace?”
“May we have a ribbon?” an older boy was forward to ask.
“I don’t know that I have ribbons,” he said. He did, sometimes, have them in his office for formalities. He didn’t know whether Jago had brought such things. But one of the staff said they could procure them, and wax, if he had his seal-ring.
He was trapped. Banichi was going to kill him.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve just come in from the stable court. I need to wash my hands. I’ll be right back down. Excuse me, give you grace, thank you…” He bowed two and three times more and made the stairs, was halfway up them when he looked up.
Tano was standing at the top of the stairs with no pleased expression on his face, a gun plainly on his hip. Tano beckoned him to come upstairs, and he ran the rest of the steps, the whole transaction between them at such an angle, he hoped, that the tourists couldn’t see the reason for his sudden burst of energy.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Tano said severely. “You were to use the back hall.”
“No one told me, nadi!” He was furious. And held his temper. The culprit was Banichi, who was in charge—and the second party responsible was clearly himself. “I need to clean up. I’ve promised these people—”
“Ribbons, nand’ paidhi. I’ll see to it. Hurry.”
He flew up the stairs past Tano, aches and all, down the hall to his apartment, with no time to bathe. He only washed, flung on fresh shirt and trousers, a clean coat, and passed cologne-damp hands over his windblown hair, which was coming out of its braid.
Then he stalked out and down the hall, and made a more civilized descent of the stairs to what had been set up as a receiving line, a place ready at the table in the hall in front of the fireplace, with wax-jack, with ribbons, with small cards, and an anxious line of atevi—for each of them, a card to sign, ribbon and seal with wax, and, with the first such signature and seal, a pleased and nervous tourist who’d received a bonus for his trip, while a line of thirty more waited, stealing glances past one another at the only living human face they’d likely seen, unless they’d been as far as Shejidan.
The paidhi was used to adult stares. The children were far harder to deal with. They’d grown up on machimi about the War. Some of them were sullen. Others wanted to touch the paidhi’s hand to see if his skin was real. One asked him if his mother was that color, too. Several were afraid of his eyes, or asked if he had a gun.
“No, nadi,” he lied to them, with mostly a clear conscience, “no such thing. We’re at peace now. I live in the aiji’s house.”
A parent asked, “Are you on vacation, nand’ paidhi?”
“I’m enjoying the lake,” he said, and wondered if his attempted assassination was on the television news yet, in whatever province the man came from. “I’m learning to ride.” He poured wax and sealed the ribbon to the card. “It’s a beautiful view.”
Thunder rumbled. The tourists looked anxiously to the door.
“I’ll hurry,” he said, and began to move the line faster, recalling the black cloud that they had seen from the ridge, down over the end of the lake—the daily deluge, he said to himself, and wondered whether it was the season and whether perhaps there was a reason why Tabini came here in the autumn, and not mid-summer. Perhaps Tabini knew better, and sent the paidhi here to be drowned.
The electricity was still off. “It looks so authentic,” one visitor said to another, regarding the candlelight.
Tour the bathrooms, he thought glumly, and longed for the hot bath that would take half an hour at least to heat. He felt the least small discomfort sitting on the hard chair, that had everything to do with the riding-pad and Nokhada’s gait, and the stretching of muscles in places he’d been unaware separate muscles existed.
A humid, cold gust of wind swept in the open front doors, fluttering the candles and making a sputter of wax from the wax-jack that sprinkled the polished wood of the table. He thought of calling out to the staff to shut the door before the rain hit, but they were all out of convenient range, and he was almost finished. The tourists would be outbound in only another moment or two, and the door was providing more light to the room than the candles did.
Thunder boomed, echoing off the walls, and he was down to the last two tourists, an elderly couple who wanted “Four cards, if the paidhi would, for the grandchildren.”
He signed and sealed, while the tourists with their ribboned cards were congregating by the open doors. The vans were pulling around, and the air smelled like rain, sharp contrast to the smell of sealing-wax.
He made an extra card, his last ribbon, for the old man, who told him his grandchildren were Nadimi and Fari and Tabona and little Tigani, who had just cut her first teeth, and his son Fedi was a farmer in Didaini province, and would the paidhi mind a picture?
He stood, feeling the stretch of stiffening muscles, he smiled at the camera, and at the general click of shutters as others took it for permission. He felt much better about the meeting, encouraged that the tourists proved approachable, even the children behaving far more easily toward him. It was the closest he supposed he’d ever come to meeting ordinary folk, except the very few he met in audience in Shejidan, and in the success of the gesture and in the habits of his job he felt constrained to a reciprocal courtesy, seeing them to the doors and onto their buses—always good policy, the extra gesture of good will, despite the chill; and he liked the old couple, who were following at his elbow and asking him about his family. “No, I don’t have a wife,” he said, “no, I’ve thought about it—”
Barb would die of boredom and frustration, in the cloister the paidhi lived in. Barb would stifle in the surrounding security, and as for being circumspect—her life wouldn’t tolerate the board’s questions, she wouldn’t pass
… and Barb… he didn’t love her, but she was what he needed.
A boy crowded near him, right up against his arm, and said, not too discreetly, “I’m that tall, look.” Which was the truth. But his parents hastily snatched him away, declaring that that was a very insheibi thing to say, very indiscreet, rude and dangerous, and begging the paidhi’s pardon could they possibly take a picture with him if a member of the paidhi’s staff could possibly snap the shutter?
He smiled, atevi-style, waited while they arranged the shot, and looked civilized and as comfortable as possible, standing with the couple as the camera clicked.
More cameras went off, the moment he stepped away, a veritable barrage of shutters.
And a random three pops outside the open doors. He turned in a heart-frozen shock, recognizing the sound of gunfire, as someone grabbed him by the arm and slammed him against the open door—as the tourists all rushed out under the portico in the rain.
Another shot rang out. The tourists cheered.
It was Tano half-smothering him, when he hadn’t even known Tano was close. “Stay here,” Tano said, and went outside, his hand on his gun.
He couldn’t stand there not knowing what was happening, or what the danger was. He risked a glance after Tano’s departing back, keeping the rest of him behind the substantial door. He saw, in the gaps of a screen of tourists, a man lying on the pavings out in the rain, and at the same remove, atevi figures coming from the lawn to the circular drive, near the cannon, mere shadows through the veils of rain. A bus driver, ignoring the whole affair, was shouting for his tourists to get aboard, that they had a long drive today, and a schedule for lunch on the lake, if the weather passed.
The tourists boarded, while the atevi shadows stood around the man lying on the cobbles. He supposed the shooting was over. He came out and stood in front of the door as the damp gusts hit him. Tano came back in haste.
“Get inside, nand’ paidhi,” Tano said. The first van was moving out, tourists pressing their faces to the windows, a few waving. He waved back, helpless habit, frozen by the grotesqueness of the sight. The van made the circular drive past the cannon and the second bus passed him.
“It’s handled, nand’ paidhi, get inside. They think it was machimi for the tourists, it’s all right.”
“All right?” He held his indignation in check and steadied his voice. “Who’s been killed? Who is it?”
“I don’t know, nand’ paidhi, I’ll try to find out, but I can’t leave you down here. Please go upstairs.”
“Where’s Banichi?”
“Out there,” Tano said. “Everything’s all right, nadi, come, I’ll take you to your rooms.” Tano’s pocket-com sputtered, and Tano turned it on, one-handed. “I have him,” Tano said. It was Banichi’s voice, Bren thought, thank God it was Banichi, but where was Jago? He heard Banichi saying something in verbal code, about a problem solved, and then another voice—telling gender with atevi voices wasn’t always easy—saying something about a second team and that being all right.
“The dowager,” Bren said in a low voice, suddenly asking himself—one had to ask, with the evidence of death on the grounds—was Ilisidi somehow involved, was she all right, was she somehow the author of what was happening out there, with Banichi?
“Perfectly safe,” Tano said, and gave him another gentle shove. “Please, nadi, Banichi’s fine, everyone is fine—”
“Who’s dead? An outsider? Someone on staff?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Tano said, “but please, nadi, don’t make our jobs more difficult.”
He let himself be maneuvered away from the doors, then, away from the blowing mist that made his clothing damp and cold, and across the dim hall and up the stairs. All the while he was thinking about the shadows in the rain, about Banichi out there, and someone lying dead on the cobbled drive, right by the flower beds and the memorial cannon—
Thinking uneasily, too, about the alarm last night, and about riding up on the ridge not an hour ago, with Ilisidi and Cenedi, where any rifle might have picked them off. The vivid memory came back, of that night in Shejidan, and the shock of the gun in his hands, and Jago saying, like a bad dream, that there was blood on the terrace. Like outside, on the lawn, in the rain.
His knees started shaking as he climbed the stairs to the upper hall. His gut was upset before he reached the doors to his apartment, as if it were that night, as if everything was slipping again out of his control.
Tano strode two steps ahead of him at the last and opened the door to his receiving room, to what should feel like refuge, where warm air met him like a wall and light flooded in from a window blind with rain. Lightning flashed, making the window white for an instant. The tourists were having a rain-drenched ride down the mountain. Their lunch on the lake seemed uncertain.
Someone had invaded the grounds last night and that someone was dead on the drive, all his plans cancelled. It hardly seemed reasonable that no one knew what they were.
Tano rang for the other servants, and assured him in a low voice that hot tea was forthcoming. “A bath,” Bren said, “if they can.” He didn’t want to deal with Djinana and Maigi right now, he wanted Tano, he wanted people he knew were Tabini’s—but he was scared to protest that to Tano, as if a question to their plans could turn into a challenge to their conspiracy of silence, a sign that the prisoner had gained the spirit to rebel, a warning that his guards should be more careful—
Another stupid thought. Banichi and Jago were the ones he wanted near him, and Tano had said it, his personal needs could only hinder whatever investigation Banichi was pursuing out there. He didn’t need to know on the same level that Banichi needed to be following that trail in the rain, needed to be asking questions among the staff, like how that person had gotten in or whether he had come with the bus or whether Banichi had somehow made a terrible mistake and it was just some poor, mistaken tourist out on the lawn for a special camera angle.
The people on the bus would miss one of their own number, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t one or the other busloads be asking why a seat was vacant, or who that had been, or had it all been machimi, just an actor, all along, an entertainment for their edification? Wasn’t it historic, and educational, here at Malguri, where fatal accidents happened on the walks?
Djinana and Maigi were quick to answer his summons, and hastened him out of Tano’s care and into the drawing room in front of the fire—peeling him out of his damp coat as they went and asking him how breakfast had gone with the dowager… as if no tourists had come in, as if nothing was going on out there, with any possible relevancy to anyone’s life—
Where was Algini? he suddenly wondered. He hadn’t seen Tano’s partner since yesterday, and someone was dead out there. He hadn’t seen Algini last night, just shadows passing through his room. He hadn’t seen Algini maybe since the day before… what with the incident with the tea, he’d lost his sense of time since he’d left Shejidan,
Tano hadn’t looked worried. But atevi didn’t always express things with their faces. Didn’t always express whal they felt, if they felt, and you didn’t know…
“Start the heater,” Maigi said to Djinana, and flung a lap-robe about him. “Nadi, please sit down and stay warm. I’ll help you with the boots.”
He eased down into the chair in front of the fire, while Maigi tugged the boots off. His hands were like ice. His feet were chilled, for no good reason at all. “Someone was shot outside,” he said in a sudden reckless mood, challenging Maigi’s silence on the matter. “Do you know that?”
“I’m sure everything’s taken care of.” Maigi knelt on the carpet, warming his right foot with vigorous rubbing. “They’re very good.”
Banichi and Jago, Maigi seemed to mean. Very good. A man was dead. Maybe it was over, and he could go back tomorrow, where his computer would work and his mail would come.
With the electricity still out, and tourists coming and going, and the dowager exposing all of them to danger on a morning ride?
Why hadn’t Banichi interposed some warning, if Banichi had any warning there was someone loose on the grounds, and why hadn’t Banichi’s warning gotten to him about the tourists?
Or hadn’t Jago said something to him, yesterday—something about a tour,—but he hadn’t remembered, dammit, he’d been thinking about the other mess he’d gotten himself into, and it hadn’t stuck in his mind.
So it wasn’t their fault. Somebody had been chasing him, and he had walked in among the tourists, where someone else could have gotten shot—if his guards hadn’t, in the considerations of finesse, somehow protected him by being there.
He felt cold. Maigi tucked him into the chair with the robe and brought in hot tea. He sat with his robe-wrapped feet propped in front of the fire, while the thunder boomed outside the window and the rain whipped at the glass, a level above the walls. The window faced the straight open sweep off the lake. It sounded like gravel pelting the glass. Or hail. Which made him wonder how the windows withstood it: whether they were somehow reinforced—and whether they were, considering the wall out there, and the chance of someone climbing it, also bulletproof.
Jago had wanted him clear of it, last night. Algini had disappeared, since before last night. The power had failed.
He sat there and kept replaying the morning in his head, the breakfast, the ride, Ilisidi and Cenedi, and the tourists and Tano, most of all the happy faces and the hands waving at him from the windows of the buses, as if everything was television, everything was machimi. He’d made a slight inroad into the country, met people he’d convinced not to be afraid of him, like the kids, like the old couple, and someone got shot right in front of them.
He’d fired a gun, he’d learned he would shoot to kill, for fear, for—he was discovering—for a terrible, terrible anger he had, an anger that was still shaking him—an anger he hadn’t known he had, didn’t know where it had started, or what it wanted to do, or whether it was directed at himself, or atevi, or any specific situation.
It hadn’t been a false alarm last night—or it was, Barb would say, one hell of a coincidence. Maybe Banichi had thought last night he was safe, and whoever it was had simply gotten that far within Banichi’s guard. Maybe they’d been tracking the assassin all along, and let him go off with Ilisidi this morning in the hope he’d draw the assassin out of cover.
Too much television, Banichi had said, that night with the smell of gunpowder in his room, and rain on the terrace. Too many machimi plays.
Too much fear in children’s faces. Too many pointing fingers.
He wanted his mail, dammit, he wanted just the catalogs, the pictures to look at. But they weren’t going to bring it.
Hanks might have missed him by now, tried to call his office and not gotten through.
On vacation with Tabini, they’d say. Hanks might know better. They monitored atevi transmissions. But they wouldn’t challenge the Bu-javid on the point. They’d go on monitoring, once they were alert to trouble, trying to find him—and blame him for not doing his job. Hanks would start packing to assume his post. Hanks always had resented his winning it over her.
And Tabini would detest Hanks. He could tell the Commission that, if they didn’t think it self-serving, and part of the feud between him and Hanks.
But if he was so damned good at predicting Tabini—or reading situations—he couldn’t prove it from where he sat now. He hadn’t made the vital call, he hadn’t put Mospheira alert to the situation—
God, that was stupid. He had the willies over some misguided lunatic and now he saw the Treaty collapsing, as if atevi had been waiting all these centuries only to resume the War, hiding a missile program they’d built on their own, launching warheads at Mospheira.
It was as stupid as atevi with their planet-skimming satellites shooting death rays. Relations between Mospheira and Shejidan had bad periods. Tabini’s administration was the least secretive, the easiest to deal with of all the administrations they’d ever dealt with.
“Death rays,” Tabini would say, and laugh, invite him to supper and a private drink of the vice humans and atevi held in common. Laugh, Tabini would say. Bren, there are fools on Mospheira and fools in the Bu-javid. Don’t take them seriously.
Steady hand, Bren-ji, like pointing the finger, there’s no difference.
Good shot, good shot, Bren…
Rain… pelted the window. Washed evidence away. Buses rolled away down the road, the tourists laughed, amazed and amused by their encounter.
They hadn’t hated him. They’d wanted photographs to prove his existence to their neighbors…
“Nadi,” Djinana said, from the doorway. “Your bathwater’s ready.”
He gathered the fortitude to move, tucked his robe about him and went with Djinana through the bedroom, through the hall and the clammy accommodation, into the overheated air of the bath, where he could shed the blanket and the rest of his clothes, to sink neck-deep into warm, steamy water.
Clouds rose around him. The water invaded the aches he wouldn’t admit to. He could lie and soak and stare stupidly at the ancient stonework around him—ask himself important questions such as why the tub didn’t fall through the floor, when the whole rest of the second floor was wood.
Or things like… why hadn’t the two staffs advised each other about the alarm last night, and why had Cenedi let them go out there?
They’d talked about cannon, and ancient wars.
Everything blurred. The stones, the precariousness, the age, the heat, the threat to his life. The storm noise didn’t get here. There was just the occasional shock of thunder through the stones, like ancient cannon shots.
And everyone saying, It’s all right, nand’ paidhi, it’s nothing for you to worry about, nand’ paidhi.
He heard footsteps somewhere outside. He heard voices that quickly died away.
Banichi coming back, maybe. Or Jago or Tano. Even Algini, if he was alive and well. Nothing in the house seemed to be an emergency. In the failure of higher technology, the methane burner worked.
The paidhi was used to having his welfare completely in others’ hands. There was nothing he could do. There was nowhere he could go.
He lay still in the water, wiggling his toes, which were cramped and sore from the boots, and ankles which were stiffening from the stress of staying on the mecheita’s back. He must have clenched his legs all the way. He sat there soaking away the aches until the water began to cool and finally climbed out and toweled himself dry—Djinana would gladly help him, but he had never had that habit with his own servants, let alone with strangers. Let alone here.
So he put on the dressing-robe Djinana had laid out, and went back to the study to sit in front of his own safe fire, read his book and wait for information, or release, or hell to freeze over, whichever came first.
Maybe they’d caught the assassin alive. Maybe they were asking questions and getting answers. Maybe Banichi would even tell him if that was the case—
Or maybe not.
“When will we have power?” he asked Djinana, when Djinana came to ask if the paidhi wanted anything else. “Do they give any estimate?”
“Jago said something about ordering a new transformer,” Djinana said, “by train from Raigan. Something blew out in the power station between here and Maidingi. I don’t know what. The paidhi probably understands the systems far better than I do.”
He did. He hadn’t realized there was a secondary station. Nobody had said there was—only the news that a quarter of Maidingi was waiting on the same repair. It was logical a power station should attract lightning, but it wasn’t reasonable that no one within a hundred miles could bring power back to a major section of a township without parts freighted in.
“This isn’t a poor province. This has to happen from time to time. Does it happen every summer?”
“Oh, sometimes,” Djinana said. “Twice last.”
“Does it happen assassins get in? Does that happen?”
“Please be assured not, nand’ paidhi. And it’s all right now.”
“Is he dead? Do they know who he was?”
“I don’t know, nand’ paidhi. They haven’t told us. I’m sure they’re trying to find out. Don’t worry about such things.”
“I think it’s natural I worry about such things,” he muttered, looking at his book. And it wasn’t fair to take his frustration out on Djinana and Maigi, who only worked here, and who would take Malguri’s reputation very personally. “I would like tea, Djinana, thank you.”
“With sandwiches?”
“I think not, Djinana, thank you, no. I’ll sit here and read.”
There were ghost ships on the lake. One was a passenger ship that still made port on midwinter nights, once at Maidingi port itself, right under the lights, and tried to take aboard the unwary and the deservedly damned, but only a judge-magistrate had gone aboard, a hundred years ago, and it had never made port again.
There was a fishing boat which sometimes appeared in storms—once, not twenty years ago, it had appeared to the crew of a stranded net-fisher that was taking on water and sinking. All but two had gone aboard, the captain and his son electing to stay with their crippled trawler. The fishing boat, which everyone had remarked to be old and dilapidated, had sailed away with the crew, never to be seen again.
Everything in the legends seemed to depend on misplaced trust, though atevi didn’t quite have the word for it: ghosts lost all power if the victims didn’t believe what they saw, or if they knew things were too good to be true, and refused to deceive themselves.
Banichi still hadn’t come back. Maigi and Djinana came asking what he wanted for dinner, and recommended a game course, a sort of elusive, cold-blooded creature he didn’t find appetizing, though he knew his servants thought it a delicacy. He asked for shellfish, instead, and Maigi thought that easy, though, Djinana said, the molluscs might not be the best this time of year: they would send down to town and they might have them, but it might be two or three hours or so before they could present them.
“Waiting won’t matter,” he said, and added, “they might lay in some more for lunch tomorrow.”
“There’s no ice,” Djinana said apologetically.
“Perhaps in town.”
“One could find out, nadi. But a great deal of the town is without power, and most houses will buy it up for their own stock. We’ll inquire…“
“No, no, nadi, please.” He survived on shellfish, in seasons of desperation. “Others doubtless need the ice. And if they can’t preserve it—please, take no chances. If the household could possibly arrange to find me fruited toast and tea, that would do quite well. I’ve no real appetite this evening.”
“Nadi, you must have more than toast and tea. You missed lunch.”
“Djinana-nadi, I must confess, I find the season’s dish very strong… a difference in perceptions. We’re quite sensitive to alkaloids. There may be some somewhere in the preparations, and it’s absolutely essential I avoid them. If there were any kabiu choice of fruit or vegetables… The dowager-aiji had very fine breakfast rolls, which I very much favor.”
“I’ll most certainly tell the cook. And—” Djinana had a most conspiratorial look. “I do think there’s last month’s smoked joint left. It’s certainly not un-kabiu, if it’s left over. And we always put by several.”
Preserved meat. Out of season, God save them.
“We never know how many guests,” Djinana said, quite straight-faced. “We’d hate to run short.”
“Djinana-nadi, you’ve saved my life.”
Djinana was highly amused, very pleased with their solution, and bowed twice before leaving.
Whereupon, for the rest of the afternoon, he went back to his ghost ships, and his headless captains of trawlers that plied Malguri shores during storms. A bell was said to ring in the advent of disasters.
Instead there was an opening of the door, a squishing of wet boots across the drawing room, and a very wet and very tired-looking Banichi, who walked into the study, and said, “I’ll join you for dinner, nadi.”
He snapped his book shut, and thought of saying that most people waited to be asked, that he hadn’t had any courtesy and that he was getting damned tired of being walked past, ignored, talked down to and treated in general like a wayward child.
“Delighted to have company,” he said, and persuaded himself he really was glad to have someone to talk to. “Tell Djinana to set another place.—Is Jago coming?”
“Jago’s on her way to Shejidan.” Banichi’s voice floated back to him from the bedroom, as he headed for the servants’ quarters and the bath. “She’ll be back tomorrow.”
He didn’t even ask why. He didn’t ask why a plane bothered to take off in the middle of a thunderstorm, the second since noon, when it was presumably the aiji’s plane, and could observe any schedule it liked. Banichi disappeared into the back hall, and after a while he heard water running in the bath. The boiler must still be up. Banichi didn’t have to wait for his bath.
As for himself, he went back to his ghost bells and his headless victims, and the shiploads of sailors lost to the notorious luck of Maidingi, which always fed on the misfortune of others when an aiji was resident in Malguri.
That was what the book said; and atevi, who believed in no omnipotent gods, who saw the universe and its quasi god-forces as ruled by baji and naji, believed at least that naji could flow through one person to the next—or they had believed so, before they became modern and cynical and enlightened, and realized that superior firepower could redistribute luck to entirely undeserving people.
He had sat about in the dressing-robe all afternoon, developing sore spots in very private areas. He declined to move, much less to dress for dinner, deciding that if Banichi had invited himself, Banichi could certainly tolerate his informality.
Banichi himself showed up in the study merely in black shirt, boots, and trousers, somewhat more formal, but only just, without a coat, and with his braid dripping wet down his back. “Paidhi-ji,” Banichi said, bowing, and, “Have a drink,” Bren said, since he was indulging, cautiously, in a before-dinner drink from his own stock, which he knew was safe. He did have a flask of Dimagi, which he couldn’t drink without a headache, and eventual more serious effects, very excellent Dimagi, he supposed, since Tabini had given it to him, and he poured a generous glass of that for Banichi.
“Nadi,” Banichi said, taking the glass with a sigh, and invited himself to sit by the fire in the chair angled opposite to his.
“So?” The liquor stung his cut lip. “A man’s dead. Was he the same one who invaded my bedroom?”
“We can’t be sure,” Banichi said.
“No strayed tourist.”
“No tourist at all. Professional. We know who he is.”
“And still no filing?”
“A very disturbing aspect of this business. This man was licensed. He had everything to lose by doing what he did. He’ll be stricken from the rolls, he’ll be denied benefits of the profession, his instructors will be disgraced. These are no small matters.”
“Then I feel sorry for his instructors,” Bren said.
“So do I, nadi. They were mine.”
Dead stop, on that point. Banichi—and this unknown man—had a link of some kind? Fellow students?
“You know him?”
“We met frequently, socially.”
“In Shejidan?”
“A son of distinguished family.” Banichi took a sip and stared into the fire. “Jago is escorting the remains and the report to the Guild.”
Not a good day, Bren decided, having lost all appetite for supper. Banichi regarded him with a flat, dark stare that he couldn’t read—not Banichi’s opinion, nor what obligation Banichi had relative to Tabini versus his Guild or this man, nor where the man’chi lay, now.
“I’m very sorry,” was all he could think to say.
“You have a right to retaliate.”
“I don’t want to retaliate. I never wanted this quarrel, Banichi.”
“They have one now.”
“With you?” He grew desperate. His stomach was upset. His teeth ached. Sitting was painful. “Banichi, I don’t want you or Jago hurt. I don’t want anybody killed.”
“But they do, nadi. That’s abundantly clear. A professional agreed with them enough to disregard Guild law—for man’chi, nadi. That’s what we have to trace—to whom was his man’chi? That’s all that could motivate him.”
“And if yours is to Tabini?”
Banichi hesitated in his answer. Then, somberly: “That makes them highly unwise.”
“Can’t we arrest them? They’ve broken the law, Banichi. Don’t we have some recourse to stop this through the courts?”
“That,” Banichi said, “would be very dangerous.”
Because it wouldn’t restrain them. He understood that. It couldn’t legally stop them until there was a judgment in his favor.
“All they need claim is affront,” Banichi said, “or business interests. And how can you defend anything? No one understands your associations. The court hardly has a means to find them out.”
“And my word is worth nothing? My man’chi is to Tabini, the same as yours. They have to know that.”
“But they don’t know that,” Banichi said. “Even I don’t know that absolutely, nadi. I know only what you tell me.”
He felt quite cold, quite isolated. And angry. “I’m not a liar. I am not a liar, Banichi. I didn’t contest with the best my people have for fifteen years to come here to lie to you.”
“For fifteen years.”
“To be sent to Shejidan. To have the place I have. To interpret to atevi. I don’t lie, Banichi!”
Banichi looked at him a long, silent moment. “Never? I thought that was the paidhl’s job.”
“Not in this.”
“How selective dare we be? When do you lie?”
“Just find out who hired him.”
“No contract could compel his action.”
“What could?”
Banichi didn’t answer that question. Banichi only stared into the fire.
“What could, Banichi?”
“We don’t know a dead man’s thoughts. I could only wish Cenedi weren’t so accurate.”
“Cenedi shot him.” So Cenedi and Ilisidi’s loyalties at least were accounted for. He was relieved.
But Banichi didn’t seem wholly pleased with Cenedi. Or, at least, with the outcome. Banichi took a sip of the drink warming in his hands and never looked away from the fire.
“But you’re worried,” Bren said.
“I emphatically disapprove these delivery vehicles. This is an unwarrantable risk. The tourists at least have a person counting heads.”
“You think that’s how he got in?”
“Very possible.”
“They’re not going to continue the tours. Are they?”
“People have had their reservations for months. They’d be quite unhappy.”
Sometimes he ran straight up against atevi mindset in ways he didn’t understand. Or expect.
“Those people were in danger, Banichi!”
“Not from him or us.”
Finesse. Biichi-ji.
“There were children in that crowd. They saw a man shot.”
Banichi looked at him as if waiting for the concluding statement that would make sense. As if they had totally left the subject.
“It’s not right, Banichi. They thought it was a machimi! They thought it was television!”
“Then they were hardly offended. Were they?”
Before he could follow that line of reasoning, Djinana and Maigi arrived down the inner hall with the dinner cart.
With a selection of dishes, the seasonal and slices from the leftover joint. Banichi’s eyes brightened at the offering, as they seated themselves in the dining room and the covers came off the dishes. State of mourning or murderous intent, Banichi had no hesitation in loading his plate, and no diminution of appetite.
The cook had provided a selection of prepared fruits, very artistically arranged. That appealed. One could have exempted the prepared head of the unseasonal game as a cap for the stewpot, but Banichi lifted it by the ears and set it delicately aside, gratefully out of view behind the stewpot. Other dead animals stared down from the walls.
“This is excellent,” Banichi said.
Bren poked at the sliced meat. His nerves were jangled. The dining chair hurt. He took up his knife and cut a bite, trying to put ghost stories and assassins out of his mind. He found the first taste excellent, and helped himself to the sliced meat and a good deal of the spicy sauce he enjoyed over the vegetables.
“Is there,” he asked, in the lull eating made, “possibly any word on my mail? I know you’ve had your hands full, but—”
“I have, as you quaintly express it, had my hands full. Perhaps Jago will remember to check the post.”
“You could call her.” Temper flared up. Or a sense of muddled desperation. “Has anyone explained to my office where I am, or why?”
“I frankly don’t know that, paidhi-ji.”
“I want you to convey a message to them. I want you to patch me through on your communications. I know you can do that, from the security station.”
“Not without clearance. It’s a public move, if the paidhi takes to our security channels. You understand the policy statement that would make, absolute encouragement to your detractors and Tabini’s.”
“What happened to security?”
“Courier is still far better. Far better, nadi. Prepare your statement. I’ll send it the next time one of us carries a report.”
Banichi didn’t refuse him. Banichi didn’t say no. But it kept coming out to procrastination, I forgot, and, There’s a reason.
He ate the rest of the meat course in silence, favoring his sore mouth.
And questions still nagged him.
“Was it an accident, the power outage?”
“Most probably. To put a quarter of the homes in Maidingi township in the dark? Hardly the Guild’s style.”
“But you knew it last night. You knew someone was loose on the grounds.”
“I didn’t know. I suspected it. We had a perimeter alarm.”
Did we? he thought bitterly. And asked, instead: “Where is Algini?”
“He’ll return with Jago.”
“Did he leave with Jago?”
“He took the commercial flight. Yesterday.”
“Carrying a report?”
“Yes.”
“For what? Forgive my frankness, Banichi-ji, but I don’t believe there’s any possible investigation to be done—to find the precise agency at work here, yes, but I don’t for a moment believe Tabini doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong and who’s behind it. I don’t believe you don’t know. I don’t believe you didn’t know where I was this morning.”
“Behind the ridge, mostly, for quite a while. I noticed your limping.”
Soreness didn’t help his mood. “You might have warned me.”
“Regarding what? That Ilisidi would go riding? She often does.”
“Dammit, if you’d told me there was the chance of a sniper, if you’d told me we’d be leaving the house, I might have come up with a reasonable objection.”
“You had a reasonable objection. You might have pleaded your recent indisposition. I doubt they would have carried you to the stables.”
“You didn’t tell me there was a danger!”
“There’s a constant danger, nadi.”
“Don’t shove me off, dammit. You let me go out there. It’s harder to find an excuse for tomorrow, when I’m also committed to go. And am I safe then? I don’t always understand your sense of priorities, Banichi, and in this, I truly confess I don’t.”
“The tea was Ilisidi’s personal opportunity. And Cenedi was with us last night, during the search. Cenedi would have taken me if he’d intended to. I made that test.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “You mean you gave Cenedi a chance to kill you?”
“When you will make promises to strangers without consulting me, paidhi-ji, you do make my job more difficult. Jago was advised of the situation. Possibly Cenedi knew it, and knew that he had Jago yet to deal with, but Cenedi is not contracted against you, I made amply certain of that. And I was between you and the estate at all times this morning.”
“Banichi, I apologize. Profoundly.”
Banichi shrugged. “Ilisidi is an old and clever woman. What did you talk about? The weather? Tabini?”
“Breakfast. Not breaking my neck. A mecheita called Babs—”
“Babsidi.” It meant ‘lethal.’ “And nothing else?”
He desperately tried to remember. “How it was her land. What plants grow here. Dragonettes.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Nothing of consequence. Cenedi talked about the ruin up there, and the cannon on the front lawn. —She ran me up a hill, I cut my lip… after that they were polite to me. And the tourists were polite to me. I gave them ribbons and signed their cards and we talked about families and where they came from.—Was either one a disaster, Banichi-ji—before some fool tried to cross the lawn? Advise me. I am asking for advice.”
Another of Banichi’s long, sober stares. Banichi’s eyes were the clearest, incredible yellow. Like glass. Just as expressive. “We’re both professionals, paidhi-ji. You are quite good.”
“You think I’m lying?”
“I mean that you’re no more off duty than I am.” Banichi lifted the flask and poured moderately for them both. “I have confidence in your professional instincts. Have confidence in mine.”
It came down to the fruit, and a creme and liqueur sauce. A man could be seduced by that, if his stomach weren’t uncertain from dinner conversation.
“If you’re running courier,” Bren said, when the atmosphere felt easier, “you can handle a written dispatch from me to my office on Mospheira.”
“We might,” Banichi said. “If Tabini approves.”
“Any word about that solar unit I wanted?”
“I’m afraid they’re prioritied, if they can find one. We’ve donated the generator we have. We have homes in the valley without power, elderly and ill persons—”
“Of course.” He couldn’t fault that answer. It was entirely reasonable. Everything was.
Confidence, Bren said to the creatures on the wall. Patience. Glass eyes stared back at him, some angry, some placidly stupid, having awaited their hunters with equanimity, one supposed.
Banichi said he had business to attend—reports to write. In longhand, one supposed.
Or not. Djinana came and took the dishes away, and lit the oil lamps, having blown out the candelabra in the dining room.
“Will you need anything more?” Djinana asked; and, “No,” Bren said, thinking to himself that of individuals who didn’t get regular hours or a fair explanation around this place, Djinana was chief. One wondered where Tano was—Tano, who was supposed to be his personal staff. While Algini was off in Shejidan. “I’m sure I won’t. I’ll read until bedtime.”
“I’ll lay out your night things,” Djinana said.
“Thank you,” he murmured, and picked up his book and took the chair by the fire, where, if he sat at an angle, with the lamps on the table beside him, the two light sources made reading at least moderately possible. Live flame flickered. He had discovered that primary good reason for light bulbs.
Djinana whisked the cart away with the dishes—the man never so much as rattled a glass when he worked. The candles were out in the dining room, leaving it a dark cavern. Elsewhere the fire cast horned and large-eared shadows about the room, and danced in the glass eyes of the beasts.
He heard Djinana open the armoire in the bedroom, and heard him go away again.
After that was a curious quiet about the place. No rain, no thunder, nothing but the crackle of the fire. He read, he turned pages—which sounded amazingly loud, on a rare romance in the histories, no one bent on feud, no inter-clan struggles, no dramatic leaps from Malguri tower, and not a drowning to be had, just a romantic couple who met and courted at Malguri, who happened to be the aijiin of two neighboring provinces, and who had a plethora of talented children.
Pleasant thought, that someone who slept in these rooms hadn’t come to a bad end; interesting, to have a notion of romantic goings-on, the gifts of flowers, the long and tender relationship of two people who, being heads of state, never quite had a domicile except Malguri, in the fall. It was a side of themselves atevi didn’t show to the paidhi—unless one counted flirtations he never knew whether he should take seriously. But that was how it went, a number of small gifts, tied to each other’s gates, or sent by third parties. Atevi marriages didn’t always mean cohabitation. Often enough they didn’t, except when there were minor children in question—and sometimes then cohabitation lasted and sometimes it didn’t. What atevi thought or what atevi felt still eluded him through the atevi language.
But he liked the aijiin of Malguri the way he’d liked the old couple with the grandchildren, touring together, he supposed, looking for adventures… maybe not cohabiting: nothing guaranteed that.
And long as paidhiin had been on the continent, they had discovered no graceful way to ask, through atevi reticence to discuss their living arrangements, their addresses, their routines or their habits—it all fell under ‘private business,’ and no one else’s.
He thought he might ask Jago. Jago at least found amusement in his rude questions. And Jago was amazingly well read. She might even know the historic couple.
He missed Jago. He wouldn’t have had a near-fight with Banichi if Jago had been here. He didn’t know why Banichi had insisted on inviting himself to supper, if he had to spend it in a surly mood.
Something hadn’t gone well, perhaps.
In a day which had included Cenedi shooting a man and that man turning out to be one Banichi knew—damned right something hadn’t gone right today, and Banichi had every reason to be in a rotten state of mind. That atevi didn’t show it and habitually understated the case didn’t mean Banichi wasn’t upset—and didn’t mean Banichi might not himself wish Jago were here. He supposed Banichi hadn’t had a good time himself, having a surly human displaying an emotional load an atevi twelve-year-old wouldn’t own to.
He supposed he even owed Banichi an apology.
Not that he wanted to give one. Because he understood didn’t mean he was reconciled, and he wished twice over that Jago hadn’t gone to Shejidan today, Jago being just slightly the younger, a little more reticent, as he read her now, even shy, but just slightly more forthcoming than Banichi once she decided to talk, whether Jago was more so by nature or because Tabini’s man’chi didn’t lie lightly on anyone’s shoulders, least of all Banichi’s.
His eyes stung with reading in the flickering light; keeping the fire lively enough to cast light to the chair made the fireside uncomfortably warm, and the oil lamps made the air thick. He found himself with a mild headache, and got up and walked, quietly, so as not to disturb the staff, into the cooler part of the room—too restless to sleep, yet.
He missed his late-night news. He missed being able to call Barb, or even, God help him, Hanks, and say the things he dared say over lines he knew were bugged. He was all but down to talking to himself, just to hear the sound of human language in the silence, to get away, however briefly, from immersion in atevi thoughts and atevi reasoning.
A motor started, somewhere. He stopped still and listened, decided someone was leaving the courtyard and going down to the town, or somewhere in between, and who that was, he had a fair notion.
Damn, he thought, and went to the window, but one couldn’t see the courtyard from there because of the sideways jut of the front hall. A pin held the latch of the side window panels, and he pulled that to see if he could tell whether the car was going down the main road or off into the hills, or whether he was about to trigger a nonhistorical security alarm by opening the latch.
Only the airline transport van, hell. Malguri had a van of its own. Food and passengers came up the road. They could have gotten him from the airport.
But Banichi had thought otherwise, perhaps. Perhaps he wanted to sound things out before relying on Cenedi.
Perhaps he still had his doubts.
The sound of the motor went up and around the walls.
He couldn’t tell. But the night air coming in was crisp and cold after the stuffiness of the room. He drew in a great breath and a second one.
First night he had been here that it hadn’t been raining, the first hour of full dark, and the sky above the lake and the mountains to the east were so clear and black and cold one could see Maudette aloft, faintly red, and Gabriel’s almost invisible companion, a real test of eyesight, on Mospheira.
The night air smelled wonderful, loaded with wildflowers, he supposed; and he hadn’t realized how he’d missed the garden outside his room; or how pent up he’d felt.
He’d been able, on clear nights on Mt. Allan Thomas, to see the station just around sunset or sunrise. He didn’t keep up with its schedule the way he had in his youth, when Toby and he had used to go hiking in the hills, when they’d used to tell stories about the Landing, and imagine—it was embarrassing, nowadays—that there were atevi guerrillas hiding in the high hills. They had used to have imaginary wars up there, shooting atevi by the hundreds, being shot at by fictitious atevi villains, about as good as the atevi machimi about secret human guerrillas supported by egomaniacs secretly concealing their base aboard the station… the Foreign Star, as atevi had called it in those long past and warlike days.
At least they’d achieved a common mythology, a common past, a common set of heroes and villains—and which was which only depending on point of view.
He never had mentioned to Tabini that his father was Polanski’s descendant several illegitimate generations down the line, the Polanski who’d generaled the standoff on Half Moon Beach, the one that had kept atevi reinforcements off Mospheira.
Nothing Poianski’s remote descendant had anything to do with—nothing, in his present job, that he wanted to admit to.
One made progress as one could. He wished atevi children didn’t see humans as shadow-players and madmen; he wished human children didn’t play at shooting atevi in the woods. The idea came to him of making that a major theme in his winter speech to the assembly… but he didn’t know how one got at all the film and all the television on both sides which kept reinforcing it all.
But not totally smart, with realities as they were, to be standing with the fire at his back. Jago had pulled him away from this very window last night… a danger from the windows or the roof of the other wing seemed stupid. But anybody could have a boat on the lake, he supposed, though not close enough to give an assassin a good target. Anybody could land on Malguri’s shore, give or take the walls and the cliffs below the walls, which were formidable.
He stepped back and began to close the window. Lights flashed on all about him. An alarm began to ring as he blinked in the glare of electric light, and slammed the window shut and latched it, heart beating in utter startlement, with the sound of bare feet crossing the wooden floor of the next room.
Tano showed up, stark naked, gun in hand, Djinana close behind him, and Maigi after that, Maigi dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, with the thump of people running out in the halls, everywhere in Malguri, the alarm still sounding.
“Did you open a window?” Tano asked. “Nadiin, I did, I’m sorry.”
His rescuers drew a collective breath as the latch rattled in the next room, and Tano dismissed Djinana in that direction with a wave of his hand.
“Nadi, they’ve brought us on-line again,” Tano said, “Your security had rather you not open the windows, for your own protection. Particularly at night.”
Djinana had let someone in from the outside hall. Cenedi showed up with Djinana and a couple of the dowager’s guard, to hear Tano say, “The paidhi opened the window, nadi.”
“Nand’ paidhi,” Cenedi said. “Please, hereafter, don’t.”
“I beg your pardons,” he said. The alarm was still going, jangling his nerves. “Can someone please turn off the alarm?”
Cenedi gave the orders. It still took time to sort out, and the oil lamps all had to be put out before he could get his rooms clear of staff.
He sank down on the side of his bed after the clatter and the commotion had died, after the doors and windows were shut, asking himself where Banichi had been and what black thoughts the dowager must be having about him at the moment.
Damned sloppy, having an alarm system down with the power. It wasn’t Banichi’s style. He didn’t think it was Cenedi’s. He didn’t think he’d seen everything that guarded Malguri. Solar-batteried security, he’d bet on it. They had the technology.
It didn’t keep the paidhi from waking the house and looking like a fool.
It didn’t make Ilisidi happier with him. He could bet on that, too.