A noisy night,” Ilisidi said, pouring her own tea—the smell of it drifted with the steam, across the table, and Bren’s stomach went queasy.
“I’m extremely sorry,” he said, “and embarrassed, aiji-mai.”
Ilisidi grinned, positively grinned, and added sugar.
It was little barbs all during breakfast. Ilisidi was in an excellent humor. She wolfed down four fish, a bowl of cereal and two cakes with sweet oil, while he stayed to the cereal and the breakfast rolls, thinking that, considering the pain he was in sitting on a hard chair this morning, he would almost rather drink Ilisidi’s tea than get onto Nokhada’s back again.
But it was downstairs, Ilisidi reveling in the stiff breeze blowing in off the lake, a breeze that tore at coat-skirts and knifed right through sweaters when one passed out of the sunlight and into the stable court.
Nokhada at least was willing to get down for him this morning, and this time, at least, he was ready for the snap of Nokhada’s rising before he was quite astride.
It hurt. God, it hurt. Not exactly the kind of pain a man could admit to, or beg off from. He only hoped for early numbness, and told himself his human ancestors had been riders, and somehow continued the species.
He brought a quick stop to Nokhada’s milling about, determined to have the final word on their course this morning—which lasted until Ilisidi moved Babs out and Nokhada jostled Cenedi’s mecheita for position at Babs’ tail in a sudden dash out onto the road.
Straight out. Ilisidi and Babs vanished over the cliff, a stride or two before Nokhada won out over Cenedi’s mount and took the same downward plunge.
Onto what thank God was trail and not empty air.
He didn’t yell, and didn’t object, though his legs did, and for a moment the pain was acute, in a dozen jolting strides down a dusty slot of a trail that began above the point where Nokhada had thrown the fit yesterday about the rein.
If they had gone off then, they would not have fallen, damn the creature. Gone an embarrassing long distance down to a second terrace above the lake, indeed they would, but there was such a terrace, whether or not, yesterday, at the start of the ride, he might have had the ability to stay on Nokhada’s back.
And he found it equally interesting that, with the plunge over the cliff available for the novice fool, Ilisidi had taken them straight up the mountain yesterday, however rough the course. A second chance missed, then. So maybe the tea was, after all, an accident.
Although, given there had been an intruder on the grounds yesterday, maybe getting them over the ridge or above line-of-sight from the fortress had been a priority.
And given Banichi’s comment about having had them under direct surveillance…
“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday that there was a possibility of someone out there?” he asked Cenedi, with the rest of the dowager’s guard trailing behind. “You knew we were in danger yesterday. Banichi informed you.”
“The outriders,” Cenedi said, “were well alert. And Banichi was never far.”
“Nadi, a risk to the dowager? In all respect, is that reasonable?”
“With Tabini’s man?” Cenedi’s face had things in common with Banichi’s. Just as expressive. “No. It wasn’t a risk.”
Not a risk? A compliment to Banichi, perhaps, but damned well a risk, under any human interpretation of the word, unless, the thought that had jogged his attention last night, there were more security systems about than either Banichi or Cenedi was going to own to. He rode by Cenedi in thinking silence, with the waves lapping the rocks below. The sky was blue. The waters danced. A dragonette soared past Nokhada’s face and made her jump, a single heart-stopping moment, close to the edge.
“Damn!” he said, and he and Nokhada had a silent war for a moment, at which Cenedi maintained complete lack of expression, and complete control of his mecheita.
Ilisidi rode ahead of them, oblivious, seemingly, to all of it. When he tilted his head back and looked up he couldn’t see the fortress walls at all, just the bowed face of the rocks and, behind them, the very edge of the modern wall that divided off the paved court from the trail. Ahead, the trail wound higher on the mountain, until they came to a promontory with a dizzying view, where Ilisidi stopped and let Babs stand, and where, when he arrived, he sat doing the same with Nokhada, telling himself that if Babs didn’t fling himself over the cliff, Nokhada wouldn’t, and he needn’t worry.
“Glorious day,” Ilisidi said.
“An unforgettable view,” he said, and thought that he never would forget it, the chanciness of their height, the power of the creature under him, the startling panorama of the lake spread out around them as far as the eye could see. skiing with Toby, he had had such sights, but never one fraught with atevi significances, never one once foreign and now freighted with names, and identity, and history. The Bu-javid—with its pressures, its schedules, its crowds of political favor-seekers—had no such views, no such absolute, breath-taking moments as Malguri offered… between hours, as yesterday, of cloistered, stifling silence, headaches from oil-burning lamps, cold, dark spots in the corners of cavernous halls and knees blistered from proximity to a waning fire.
Not to mention the plumbing.
But it had its charm. It had its moments, it had the incredible texture of life that didn’t measure by straight lines and standardized measures, that didn’t go by streets and straight edges, with people living stacked up on top of each other, and lights blotting out the stars at night. Here, one could hear the wind and the waves, one could find endless variety in weathered stones and pebbles and there was no schedule but the inescapable fact that riding out and riding back were the same distance…
Ilisidi talked about the trading ships and the fishermen, while the high, thin trail of a jet passed above Malguri on its way east, across the continental divide, across the barrier that had held two atevi civilizations from meeting for thousands of years—a matter of four, five hours, now, that easy. But Ilisidi talked about crossings of Maidingi that took days, and involved separate aijiin’s territory.
“In those days,” Ilisidi said, “one proceeded very carefully into the territory of foreign aijiin.”
Not without a point. Again.
“But we’ve learned so much more, nand’ dowager.”
“More than what?”
“That walling others out equally walls us in, nand’ dowager.”
“Hah,” Ilisidi declared, and with a move he never saw, spun Babs about and lit out along the hill, scattering stones.
Nokhada followed. All of them had to. And it hurt, God, it hurt when they struck the downhill to the lake. Ahead of them, Ilisidi, with her white-shot braid flying—no ribbon of rank, no adornment, just a red and black coat, and Babsidi’s sleek black rump, tail switching for nothing more than excess energy—nothing more in Ilisidi’s mind, perhaps, than the free space in front of her.
Catching up was Nokhada’s idea; but with the rest of the guard behind, and Cenedi beside, there was nothing to do but follow.
At another time they stopped, on the narrow half-moon of a sandy beach, where the lake curved in, and a man thinking of assassins could only say to himself that there were places on the shore where a boat could land and reach Malguri.
But standing while the mecheiti caught their breaths, Ilisidi talked about the lake, its depth, its denizens—its ghosts. “When I was a child,” she said, “a wreck washed up on the south shore, just the bow of it, but they thought it might be from a treasure ship that sank four hundred years ago. And divers went out for it, all up and down this shore. They say they never found it. But a number of antiquities turned up in Malguri, and the servants were cleaning them in barrels in the stable court, about that time. My father sent the best pieces to the museum in Shejidan. And it probably cost him an estate. But most people in Maidingi province would have melted them for the gold.”
“It’s good he saved them.”
“Why?”
“For the past,” he said, wondering if he had misunder stood something else in atevi mindset. “To save it. Isn’t that important?”
“Is it?” Ilisidi answered him with a question and left him none the wiser. She was off again up the hill, and he forgot all his philosophy, in favor of protecting what he feared might have progressed to blisters. Damn the woman, he thought, and thought that if he pulled up and lagged behind as long as he could hold Nokhada’s instincts in check, the dowager might take that for a surrender and slow down, but damned if he would, damned if he would cry help or halt. Ilisidi would dismiss him from her company then, probably lose all interest in him, and he could lie about in a warm bath, reading ghost stories until his would-be assassins flung themselves against the barriers Banichi had doubtless set up, and killed themselves, and he could go home to air-conditioning, the morning news, and tea he could trust. From moment to moment it seemed like the only escape.
But he kept Ilisidi’s pace. Atevi called it na’itada. Barb called it being a damned fool. He had never spent so long an hour as it took to get home again, an hour in which he told himself repeatedly he had rather fall off the mountain and be done.
Finally the gates of the stable court were in front of them, then behind them, with the mecheiti anxious for stables and grain. He managed to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, and climbed down off Nokhada’s towering height onto legs he wasn’t sure would bear his weight.
“A hot bath,” Ilisidi called out to him. “I’ll send you some herbs, nand’ paidhi. I’ll see you in the morning!”
He managed to bow, and, among Ilisidi’s entourage, to walk up the stairs without conspicuously limping.
“The soreness goes,” Cenedi said to him quietly, “in four or five days.”
A hot bath was all he was thinking of, all the long way up to the front hall. A hot bath, for about an hour. A soft and motionless chair. Soaking and reading seemed an excellent way to spend the remainder of the day, sitting in the sun, minding his own business, evading aijiin and their athletic endeavors. He limped down the long hall and started the stairs up to his floor, at his own pace.
Quick footsteps crossed the stone floor below the stairs. He looked back in some concern for his safety in the halls and saw Jago coming toward the stairs, all energy and anxiousness. “Bren-ji,” she called out to him. “Are you all right?”
The limp showed. His hair was flying loose from its braid and there was dust and fur and spit on his coat. “Fine, nadi-ji. Was it a good flight?”
“Long,” she said, overtaking him in a handful of double steps a human would struggle to make. “Did you fall, Bren-ji? You didn’t fall off…”
“No, just sore. Perfectly ordinary.” He made a determined effort not to limp the rest of the way up the stairs, and went beside her down the hall… which was supposing she wanted the company of sweat and mecheita fur. Jago smelled of flowers, quite nicely so. He’d never noticed it before; and he was marginally embarrassed—not polite to sweat, the word had passed discreetly from paidhi to paidhi. Overheated humans smelled different, and different was not good with atevi, in matters of personal hygiene; the administration had pounded that concept into junior administrative heads. So he tried to keep as discreetly as possible apart from Jago, glad she was back, wishing he might have a chance for a bath before debriefing, and wishing most of all that she’d been here last night. “Where’s Banichi? Do you know? I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“He was down at the airport half an hour ago,” Jago said. “He was talking to some television people. I think they’re coming up here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, nadi. They came in on the flight. It could have to do with the assassination attempt. They didn’t say.”
Not his business, he concluded. Banichi would handle it with his usual discretion, probably put them on the next flight out.
“Not any other trouble here?”
“Only with Banichi.”
“How?”
“Just not happy with me. I seem to have done something or said something, nadi-ji—I’m not even sure.”
“It isn’t a comfortable business,” Jago said, “to report an associate to his disgrace. Give him room, nand’ paidhi. Some things aren’t within your office.”
“I understand that,” he said, telling himself he hadn’t understood: he’d been unreasonably focussed on his own discomforts last night, to the exclusion of Banichi’s own reasonable distress. It began to dawn on him that Banichi might have wanted things of him he just hadn’t given, before they’d parted in discomfort with each other. “I think I was very rude last night, nadi. I shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t doing my job. I think he’s right to be upset with me. I hope you can explain to him.”
“You have no ‘job’ toward him, Bren-ji. Ours is toward you. And I much doubt he took offense. If he allowed you to see his distress, count it for a compliment to you.”
Unusual notion. One part of his brain went ransacking memory, turning over old references. Another part went on vacation, wondering if it meant Banichi did after all like him.
And the sensible, workaday part of his brain told the other two parts to pay attention to business and quit expecting human responses out of atevi minds. Jago meant what Jago said, point, endit; Banichi let down his guard with him, Banichi was pissed about a dirty business, and neither Banichi nor Jago was suddenly, by being cooped up with a bored human, about to break out in human sentiment. It wasn’t contagious, it wasn’t transferable, and probably he frustrated hell out of Banichi, too, who’d just as busily sent him clues he hadn’t picked up on. As a dinner date, he’d been a dismal substitute for Jago, who’d been off explaining to the Guild why somebody wanted to kill the paidhi; and probably by the end of the evening, Banichi had ideas of his own why that could be.
They reached the door. He had his key from his pocket, but Jago was first with hers, and let them into the receiving room.
“So glum,” she said, looking back at him. “Why, nand’ paidhi?”
“Last night. We were saying things—I wished I hadn’t. I wish I’d said I was sorry. If you could convey to him that I am…”
“Said and did aren’t even brothers,” Jago said. She pulled the door to, pocketed her key and took the portfolio from under her arm. “This should cheer you. I brought your mail.”
He’d given up. He’d accepted that it wasn’t going to get through security; and Jago threw over all his suppositions about his situation in Malguri.
He took the bundle she handed him and sorted through it, not even troubling to sit down in his search for personal mail.
It was mostly catalogs, not nearly so many as he ordinarily got; three letters, but none from Mospheira—two from committee heads in Agriculture and Finance, and one with Tabini’s official seal.
It wasn’t all his mail, not, at least, his ordinary mail—nothing from Barb or his mother. No communication from his office, messages like, Where are you? Are you alive?
Jago surely knew what was missing. She had to know, she wasn’t that inefficient. And what did he say about it? She stood there, waiting, probably in curiosity about Tabini’s letter.
Or maybe knowing very well what was in it.
He began to be scared of the answers—scared of his own ignorance and his own failure to figure out what the silence around him was saying, or what of Tabini’s signals he was supposed to have picked up.
He ran his thumbnail under the seal on Tabini’s letter, hoping for rescue, hoping it held some sort of explanation that didn’t add up to disaster.
Tabini’s handwriting—was not the clearest hand he had ever dealt with. The usual declaration of titles. I hope for your health, it began, with Tabini’s calligraphic flourish. I hope for your enjoyment of Malguri’s resources of sun and water.
Thanks, Tabini, he thought sourly, thanks a lot. The rainy season, no less. He rested a sore backside against the table to read it, while Jago waited.
Something about television. Television, for God’s sake.
… my intention by this interview to give people around the world an exposure to human thought and appearance far different than the machimi have presented. I feel this is a useful opportunity which should not be wasted, and have great confidence in your diplomacy, Bren. Please be as frank with these professionals as you would be with me, privately.
“Nadi Jago. Do you know what’s in this?”
“No, Bren-ji. Is there a problem?”
“Tabini’s sent the television crew!”
“That would explain the people on the flight. I am surprised we weren’t advised. Though I’m sure they have credentials.”
Under the circumstances which have made advisable your isolation from the City and its contacts, I can think of no more effective counter to your enemy than the cultivation of increased public favor. I have spoken personally to the head of news and public awareness at the national network, and authorized a reputable and highly regarded news crew to meet with you at Malguri, for an interview which may, in my hopes and those of the esteemed lord Minister of Education, lead to monthly news conferences…
“He wants me to do a monthly news program! Do you know about this?”
“I plead not, nadi-ji. I’m sure, however, if Tabini-aiji has cleared these individuals to speak to you, they’re very reputable people.”
“Reputable people.” He scanned the letter for more devastating news, found only I know the weather in this season is not the best, but I hope that you have found pleasure in the library and accommodation with the esteemed aiji-dowager, to whom I hope you will convey my personal good wishes.
“This is impossible. I have to talk to Tabini.—Jago, I need a phone. Now.”
“I’ve no authorization, Bren-ji. There isn’t a phone here, and I’ve no authorization to remove you from our—”
“The hell, Jago!”
“I’ve no authorization, Bren-ji.”
“Does Banichi?”
“I doubt so, nadi-ji.”
“Well, neither do I. I can’t talk to these people.”
Jago’s frown grew anxious. “The paidhi tells me that Tabini-aiji has authorized these people. If Tabini-aiji has authorized this interview, the paidhi is surely aware that it would be a very great embarrassment to these people and their superior, extending even to the aiji’s court. If the paidhi has any authorization in this letter to refuse this, I must ask to see this letter.”
“It’s not Tabini. I’ve no authorization from Mospheira to do any interview. I absolutely can’t do this without contacting my office. I certainly can’t do it on any half-hour notice. I need to contact my office. Immediately.”
“Is not your man’chi to Tabini? Is this not what you said?”
God, right down the predictable and unarguable slot.
“My man’chi to Tabini doesn’t exclude my arguing with him or my protecting my position of authority among my own people. It’s my obligation to do that, nadi-ji. I have no force to use. It’s all on your side. But my man’chi gives me the moral authority to call on you to do my job.”
The twists and turns of a trial lawyer were a necessary part of the paidhi’s job. But persuading Jago to reinterpret man’chi was like pleading a brief against gravity.
“Banichi would have to authorize it,” Jago said with perfect composure, “if he has the authority, which I don’t think he does, Bren-ji. If you wish me to go down to the airport, I will tell him your objection, though I fear the television crew will come when their clearance says to come, which may be before any other thing can be arranged, and I cannot conceive how Tabini could withdraw a permission he seems to have granted without—”
“I feel faint. It must be the tea.”
“Please, nadi, don’t joke.”
“I can’t deal with them!”
“This would reflect very badly on many people, nadi. Surely you understand—”
“I cannot decide such policy changes on my own, Jago! It’s not in the authority I was given—”
“Refusal of these people must necessarily have far-reaching effect. I could not possibly predict, Bren-ji, but can you not comply at least in form? This surely won’t air immediately, and if there should be policy considerations, surely there could be ameliorations. Tabini has recommended these people. Reputations are assuredly at stake in this.”
Jago was no mean lawyer herself—versed in man’chi and its obligations, at least, and the niceties on which her profession accepted or didn’t accept grievances. Life and death. Justified and not. And she had a point. She had serious points.
“May I see the letter, Bren-ji? I don’t, of course, insist on it, but it would make matters clearer.”
He handed it over, Jago walked over to the window to read it, not, he thought, because she needed the light.
“I believe,” she said, “you’re urged to be very frank with these people, nadi. I think I understand Tabini-aiji’s thinking, if I may be so forward. If anything should happen to you—it would be very useful to have popular sympathy.”
“If anything should happen to me.”
“Not fatally. But we have taken an atevi life.”
He stood stock still, hearing from Jago what he thought he heard. It was her impeccable honesty. She could not perceive that there was prejudice in what she said. She was thinking atevi politics. That was her job, for Tabini and for him.
“An atevi life.”
“We’ve taken it in defense of yours, nand’ paidhi. It’s our man’chi to have done so. But not everyone would agree with that choice.”
He had to ask. “Do you, nadi?”
Jago delayed her answer a moment. She folded the letter. “For Tabini’s sake I certainly would agree. May I keep this in file, nadi?”
“Yes,” he said, and shoved the affront out of his mind. What did you expect? he asked himself, and asked himself what was he to do without consultation, what might they ask and what dared he say?
Jago simply took the letter and left, through his bedroom, without answering his question.
An honest woman, Jago was, and she’d given him no grounds at all to question her protection. It wasn’t precisely what he’d questioned—but she doubtless didn’t see it that way.
He’d alienated Banichi and now he’d offended Jago. He wasn’t doing well at all today.
“Jago,” he called after her. “Are you going down to the airport?”
Atevi manners didn’t approve yelling at people, either. Jago walked all the way back to answer him.
“If you wish. But what I read in the letter gives me little grounds on which to delay these people, nand’ paidhi. I can only advise Banichi of your feelings. I don’t see how I could do otherwise.”
He was at the end of his resources. He made a small, weary bow. “About what I said. I’m tired, nadi, I didn’t express myself well.”
“I take no offense, Bren-ji. The opinion of these people is uninformed. Shall I attempt to reach Banichi?”
“No,” he said in despair. “No. I’ll deal with them. Only suggest to Tabini on my behalf that he’s put me in a position which may cost me my job.”
“I’ll certainly convey that,” Jago said. And if Jago said it that way, he did believe it.
“Thank you, nadi,” he said, and Jago bowed and went on through the bedroom.
He followed, with a vacation advertisement and a crafts catalog, which he figured for bathtub reading.
Goodbye to the hour-long bath. He rang for Djinana to advise him of the change in plans, he shed the coat in the bedroom, limped down the hall into the bathroom and shed dusty, spit-stained clothes in the hamper on the way to the waiting tub.
The water was hot, frothed with herbs, and he would have cheerfully spent half the day in it, if Djinana would only keep pouring in warm water. He drowned the crafts catalog, falling asleep in mid-scan—just dropped his hand and soaked it: he found himself that tired and that little in possession of his faculties.
But of course Tano came in to say a van had pulled up in the portico, and it was television people, with Banichi, and they were going to set up downstairs. Would the paidhi care to dress?
The paidhi would care to drown, rather than put on court formality and that damned tailored coat, but Tabini had other plans.
He’d not brought his notes on the transportation problems. He thought he should have. It went to question after question, until at least numbness had set in where he met the chair and where an empty stomach protested the lack of lunch.
“What,” the interviewer asked then, “determines the rate of turnover of information? Isn’t it true that all these systems exist on Mospheira?”
“Many do.”
“What wouldn’t?”
“We don’t use as much rail. Local air is easier. The interior elevations make air more practical for us.”
“But you didn’t present that as an option to the aiji two hundred years ago.”
“We frankly worried that we’d be attacked.”
“So there are other considerations than the environment.”
Sharp interviewer. And empowered by someone to ask questions that might not make the broadcast, but—might, still. Tabini had confidence in this man, and sent him.
“There’s also the risk,” he said, “of creating problems among atevi. You had rail—you almost had rail at the time of the Landing. If we’d thrown air travel into Shejidan immediately, it might have provoked disturbances among the outlying Associations. Not everyone believed Barjida-aiji would share the technology. And better steam trains were a lot less threatening. We could have turned over rockets. We could have said, in the very first negotiations—here’s the formula for dynamite. And maybe irresponsible people would have decided to drop explosives on each other’s cities. We’d just been through a war. It was hard enough to get it stopped. We didn’t want to provide new weapons for another one. We could have dropped explosives from planes, when we built them. But we didn’t want to do that.”
“That’s a good point,” the interviewer said.
He hoped it was. He hoped people thought about it.
“We don’t ever want a war,” he said. “We didn’t have much choice about being on this planet. We caused harm we didn’t intend or want. It seems a fair repayment, what the Treaty asked.”
“Is there a limit to what you’ll turn over?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What about highways?”
Damn, that question again. He drew a breath to think about it. “Certainly I’ve seen the realities of transportation in the mountains. I intend to take my observations to our council. And I’m sure the nai-aijiin will have recommendations to me, too.”
A little laughter at that. And a sober next question: “Yet you alone, rather than the legislature, determine whether a town gets the transport it needs.”
“Not myself alone. In consultation with the aiji, with the councils, with the legislatures.”
“Why not road development?”
“Because—”
Because mecheiti followed the leader. Because Babs was the leader, and Nokhada hadn’t a choice, without fighting that Nokhada didn’t want, damned stupid idea, and he had to say something to that question, something that didn’t insult atevi.
“Because,” he said, trapped. “We couldn’t predict what might happen. Because we saw the difficulties of regulation.” He panicked. He was losing the threads of it, not making sense, and not making sense sounded like a lie. “We feared at the outset the allocation of road funds might cause division within the Association. A breakdown of an authority we didn’t understand.”
The interviewer hesitated, politely expressionless. “Are you saying, nand’ paidhi, that this policy was based on misapprehension?”
Oh, God. “Initially, perhaps.” The mind snapped back into focus. The village problem was the atevi concern. “But we don’t think it would have led to a solution for the villages. If there’d been highways a hundred, two hundred years ago, there’d have been a growth in unregulated commerce. If that had happened—the commercial interests would build where the biggest highways were, and the straighter the highways, the more big population centers in a row, the more attraction they’d be—while no one but the aiji would have defended the remote villages, who still would have trouble getting transportation, very much what we have now, but we’d also have the pollution from the motors and the concentration of even more political power into the major population strings, along those roads. I see a place for a road system—in the villages, not the population centers, as spur lines to the centralized transport system.”
He didn’t engage the interviewer’s interest. He’d gotten too detailed, too technical, or at least promised to lead to technical matters the interviewer didn’t want or felt his audience didn’t want. He sensed the shift in intention, as the interviewer shifted position and frowned. He was glad of it. The interviewer posed a few more questions, about where he lived, about family associations, about what he did on vacation, thank God, none of them critical. He was sweating under the lights when the interview wound to its close and the interviewer went through the obligatory courtesies.
‘Thank you, nand’ paidhi,“ the man said, and Bren withheld the sigh of relief as the lights went out.
“I’m sorry,” he said at once, “I’m not used to cameras. I’m afraid I wasn’t very coherent at all.”
“You speak very well, nand’ paidhi, much better than some of our assignments, I assure you. We’re very pleased you found the time for us.” The interviewer stood up, he stood up, Banichi stood up, from the shadowed fringes, where the lights had obscured his presence. Everyone bowed. The interviewer offered a hand to shake. Someone must have told him that.
“You’ve been informed on our customs,” he ventured to say, and the interviewer was pleased and bowed, shaking hands with a crushing grip.
There was the commercial plane returning at sunset. The news crew had another assignment in Maidingi, on the electrical outage. Thank God. The crew was packing up lights, disconnecting cable run like an infestation of red and black vines across the ancient carpets, from the remote hallways. Maigi went to retrieve the far end somewhere near the kitchens, where, Bren was sure, the staff was not eager to admit strangers. Everything folded away into boxes, The glass-eyed animals stared back from the walls, as amazed and dazed as the paidhi.
What have I done? he asked himself, asked himself if he could justify everything he’d said, when he wrote his report to Mospheira, but they’d kept off sensitive topics—he’d accomplished that much, give or take his mental lapse on the highway question.
“We’d like to do more such interviews,” the man said—he could not recall the name: Daigani or something like it. “We’d be delighted to tape one, nand’paidhi, actually in Mospheira. Perhaps reciprocal arrangements with your television, but one of our crews actually on site—interviews with ordinary people, that sort of thing.”
“Certainly if something of the sort could be worked out,” he answered. It was the answer to any unlikely proposal. He couldn’t have it go to Mospheira as something he’d agreed to. “I could contact the appropriate people—” It was a deliberate, Give me a phone, challenge to Banichi and Jago and Tabini. A dozen uneasy thoughts slithered through the back of his mind. The news services had to know that someone had tried to kill him, and no one had mentioned that fact. He hadn’t. The Bu-javid’s conspiratorial attitude about security seeped into the blood and bone of those who lived there—one didn’t talk to the press without authorization, one didn’t carry gossip, one left it to the departments with authority to state official policy.
But he couldn’t tell the news that a man had died here yesterday? Or they knew and didn’t ask?
He didn’t know what had gone out on the news in the last week. He didn’t know what was common knowledge and what wasn’t, and the policy of his office said keep quiet when you didn’t know.
So he made polite expressions and bowed and sweated, still, in spite of the cooling of the air. A front was moving in. The crew hoped their flight would beat it out. They’d ridden through the front this morning, a choppy, bumpy flight, what Jago called ‘long,’ and the news crew called ‘uncomfortable,’
But the front doors were open now, with the wind blowing through, and the light coming in, brighter than the electric bulbs in this hall, which only managed a wan, golden glow. The crew carried out their lights, the interviewer lingered for small talk, and Tano and Algini had their heads together over by the door, watching the crew carry the equipment—Algini had come up with them. So had Banichi, Jago was… somewhere, probably resting; and meanwhile the thoughts about what he’d said and what he’d thought kept jostling one another at the back of his mind, clamoring for attention and further analysis.
Banichi carefully disengaged the interviewer, then, and walked him as far as the door, where one last round of bows was obligatory.
Bren made his own courtesies, and, with the last of the crew outside, leaned his shoulders against the shadowed back of the door and sighed in relief.
“Tano and Aligini will see them down to the airport,” Banichi said, turning up as a shadow out of the sunlight. “They may stay down, for supper. I discovered a good restaurant.”
“That’s fine,” he said, and didn’t ask Why don’t we all go? because most patrons didn’t like assassinations during the salad course. He realized he’d been nervous as hell about the interview, not alone because of the questions that might turn up, but because he didn’t trust the crew with all those boxes of equipment, and because he didn’t know these people.
He’d become, he decided, thoroughly paranoid. Afraid, And he didn’t think a crew from the national news network was going to produce explosive devices.
It was stupid.
“You did very well, nand’ paidhi.”
“I couldn’t get my thoughts together. I could have done better.”
“Tabini thinks there should be more of these interviews,” Banichi said. “He thinks it’s time the paidhi became more public. More in touch with the people.”
“Is that going to stop the people that don’t want me alive?” He didn’t mean to be negative. Doubtless the move was a good idea. Doubtless Tabini thought so. But his uneasy feeling persisted.
“Why don’t you go upstairs, nadi, and get out of the coat? You can relax now.”
He didn’t know if he could manage to relax, for the rest of the day, but the coat collar chafed, and he’d gotten stiff, sitting still. It was more than a good idea, to go up and change clothes. It was the only thing they’d let him do or decide for the rest of the day. His grand single decision.
Until tomorrow.
He said, because it was politic at the moment and because he’d meant it, earlier, and sullenly told himself he would, again: “I was rude last night, Banichi, forgive me.”
“I didn’t notice,” Banichi said. Banichi’s attention was out the door, toward the van, the doors of which were slamming shut.
“I’m sorry about your associate. And for your instructors.”
“It was none of your doing. Or mine. One only wishes he had been wiser—but no more successful.” Banichi laid a hand on his shoulder, only half welcome. “Go upstairs, nadi.”
Go away, don’t bother me. The paidhi could translate. Banichi’s thoughts were elsewhere, and he—after the heat of the lights—decided he was going to go back upstairs and finish the bath he’d had to leave. People didn’t bother him in the bath. He didn’t have to talk philosophy in the bath. And it helped a soreness he didn’t want to discuss with the servants.
It took no little time to fire up the boiler again, and run water. He took the time for a light lunch, in which he read the first committee letters, then thought—how quickly the mind dropped into familiar ruts—that he should take computer notes.
But they didn’t run extension cords from the kitchen for the paidhi, no, just for news cameramen, and no one mentioned going back to Shejidan.
So he had his bath, leaned his head back on the rim of the tub, steam rising around him. He had a glass of the human-compatible liquor sitting by him, and a stack of catalogs… the vacation catalog, among them, plus one for sports equipment—not that he had any reasonable use for a second pair of skis, or another ski suit, but, then, almost all his catalog-perusing was wishful.
Thunder rumbled through the stones. He wondered idly if the news crew’s commercial flight had made it out on schedule. He truly hoped so. He wanted them out and away. He wondered, too, what Algini and Tano were up to in the rustic pleasures of Maidingi township. Sightseeing around the lake shore, maybe. One hoped they wouldn’t be soaked.
He had a sip from the sweating glass—ice in good liquor? Tabini had asked him incredulously, early in their acquaintance.
Djinana, presented with such a request, had raised his brows and blinked, much more diplomatic. And with the power on again, and the lights working, ice did exist in the kitchens.
He turned the page and considered ski boots, scanned the art and culture inset, a service of the company, which described the recovery of old art from the data banks. Read the article on the building of the Mt. Allan Thomas resort, the first luxury establishment on Mospheira, where a hardy few had resurrected the idea of skiing.
Atevi were lately showing an interest in the sport, on their own mountains. Tabini called it suicide—then seemed to show a grudging flicker of interest himself, when he’d seen the homemade skiing tapes the paidhi had cleared through the Commission.
A potential common passion, human and atevi. Good for relations.
He’d almost talked Tabini into trying it, if the damned security crisis hadn’t blown up. He might yet. There were, supposedly, good slopes in the Bergid, only an hour away from Shejidan—where fools risked their necks, as Tabini put it.
The interview still bothered him. He still worried over what he’d said, or what expression he’d had, when atevi didn’t show expression… and he wasn’t used to television cameras and talking to glaring lights…
Thunder crashed. The lights flickered. And went out.
Incredible. He cast a baleful look at the dimmed ceiling, in which the bulb was out.
But he refused, this time, to be inconvenienced. Hot water didn’t become unhot instantly. The candles were still in the sconce. He got out in the warm air, took a candle from the candelabrum on the table, lit it from the boiler flame, and with the one candle, lit the candles in the sconce. He heard the servants shouting at each other down the hall, not panicked, except perhaps the cook, who probably had reason, at this hour. But come lightning, come storm, Malguri managed.
He settled back into the hot water, complacent and competent in his atevi past—the paidhi having learned the world didn’t stop when the power failed. He sipped his iced drink, and went back to the contemplation of safety ski bindings, buyer’s choice, black, white, or glowing green.
Hurried footsteps arrived from the accommodation. He looked up as a flashlight beam flared into his eyes, with a black, metal-sparked figure behind it,
“Bren-ji?” Jago asked. “Our apologies. It’s general, I’m afraid. Are you all right?”
“Perfectly fine,” he said. “—Do you mean to tell me that that piece of equipment they just freighted in and installed—just went out?”
“We truly don’t know, at this point. We suspect the first incident was arranged. We’re investigating this one. Please stay put.”
Away went the sense of security. The thought of intruders in the halls, while he was sitting in the bath—was not comfortable. “I’m getting out.”
“I’m going to be here,” Jago said. “You don’t have to, nadi-ji.”
“I’d rather. It’s fine. I was just going to read.”
“I’ll be in the reception room. I’ll tell Djinana.”
Jago left. He climbed out and dressed by candlelight, took a candle with him, but someone had already lit the lamps in the bedroom and in the sitting room.
Rain spattered the sitting room windows, a gray sameness that began to seem natural. He felt sorry for Banichi—who was probably out in that. Sorry, and worried for his safety. He didn’t understand how someone faked a lightning strike, or what they could have found out that changed things.
He walked into the reception room, found Jago standing in front of the window, the clouded light making a mask of her profile and glittering on her uniform. She was staring out at the lake, or at the featureless sky.
“They wouldn’t try the same thing again,” he said. “They can’t be that crazy.”
Jago looked at him—gave a small, strange laugh. “Perhaps that makes them clever. They expect us not to take it for granted.”
“They?”
“Or he or she. One doesn’t know, nadi. We’re trying to find out.”
Don’t bother me, he decided that meant. He stood and looked out the window, which gave him nothing at all.
“Go read if you like,” Jago said.
As if the mind could leap, that quickly, back to ski catalogs. His damned well couldn’t. It didn’t like informational voids; it didn’t like silent guards lurking in his reception room, or the chance there was a reason to need them, possibly slipping up the stairs outside.
Read, hell. He wanted a window that overlooked something but gray. He hadn’t the disposition, he decided. He was far too nervous.
“Nadi Bren. Come away from the window.”
He didn’t think about such things. He was chagrined, to be caught twice, shook his head and walked back—
Jago was staring at him with disturbing worry—set to shepherd a fool, he supposed, who walked in front of windows. “Sorry,” he said.
“Think as one thinks trying to reach you,” she said. “Do them no favors. Go, sit, relax.”
Guild assassin, Banichi had said. Someone Banichi knew. Socialized with.
And didn’t yet know why a man had broken the rules?
“Jago,—how does a person get a license?”
“To do what, Bren-ji?”
“You know. The Guild.” He wanted not to tread on sensibilities with Jago. He was sorry he’d wandered into the territory.
“To be licensed to the Guild? One elects. One chooses.”
It told him no more than before, what pushed a sane person in that direction. Jago didn’t seem the type—if there was a type to the profession.
“Bren-ji. Why do you ask?”
“Wondering—what sort of person is after me.”
Jago seemed to ignore his question then, looking off to the window. Into rain-spatter and nothing.
“We’re not one kind, Bren-ji. We’re not one face.”
None of your business, he supposed. “Nadi,” he said, departing, willing to leave her to her own thoughts, if he could only shake his own.
“What sort becomes paidhi?” she asked him, before he could take a second step.
Good question, he thought. Solid hit. He had to think about it, and didn’t find the answer he’d used to have… couldn’t even locate the boy who’d started down that track, couldn’t believe in him, even marginally.
“A fool, probably.”
“One doubts, nadi-ji. Is that a requirement?”
“I think so.”
“So… how do you vie for this honor? In what foolishness?”
“Curiosity. Wanting to know more than Mospheira. Doing good to the planet we’re on, the people we live next to.”
“Is this also Wilson?”
Dead hit. What could he say?
“You,” Jago said, “do not act like Wilson-paidhi.”
“Valasi-aiji,” he countered, “wasn’t Tabini, either.”
“True,” Jago said. “Very true.”
“Jago, I—” He was up against that word, which only governed salad courses. He shook his head and started to walk away.
“Bren-ji. Please finish.”
He didn’t want to talk. He wasn’t sure of his rationality, let alone his self-control. But Jago waited.
“Jago-ji, I’ve worked all my life, best I can do. I don’t know what else I can do. Now we’ve lost the lights again. I don’t think I’ve deserved this. But I ask myself, nadi, is it my fault, have I gone too far and too fast, have I done Tabini harm by trying to help him, and is someone that damned persistent in trying to kill me? Why, Jago? Do you have the remotest notion?”
“You bring change,” Jago said. “To some, this is frightening.”
“The damned railroad?” The emphasis of the interview bewildered him. Jago was all but a shadow to him, expressionless, unreachable. He made a frustrated dismissal with his hand and walked away toward the sitting room, only to gain a space to think, to sit down and read and take his mind off the day’s bizarre turn, maybe before supper, which she might share, if no one poisoned the cook.
But he stopped again, fearing he might insult her. “If someday,” he said, “this television business ever works out to bring news crews onto Mospheira, I’ll ask for you and Banichi to come visit my family, I’d like you to see what we are. I’d like you to know us, nadi-ji.”
“I’d be most honored,” Jago said solemnly.
So perhaps he’d patched things. He walked away into the sitting room and threw another piece of wood onto the fire, while thunder echoed off the walls. Jago had followed him in, evidently conceiving that as what he wanted, but she said nothing, only took up looking through the sitting room library shelves instead.
There was no interfering with Jago’s notions of duty, or what she might conceive as being sociable. He took up his book, began to sit down.
The lights came on again.
He looked up, frustrated, at the ceiling fixtures.
“It must have been a fuse,” Jago said, from across the room. “That’s good.”
He recalled dusty old wires running beside bare natural gas pipes, along the hall ceiling, and envisioned the whole apartment going up in an electrical disaster. “Malguri needs a new electrical system,” he muttered. “Where do they have that gas tank?”
“What gas?”
“Methane.”
“In the cellar,” Jago said.
“Under the building. It’s a damned bomb, nadi. The place needs electric furnaces. If they’ve installed electric lights, surely electric furnaces can’t hurt.”
“Funding,” Jago said.
“While they’re looking for assassins—do they watch that tank?”
“Every access to this building,” Jago said, “is under surveillance.”
“Except when the power’s out.”
Jago made a small shrug.
“Those windows,” he said, “aren’t watched. I found that out last night, when the power came back on.”
Jago frowned, went close to the window, and ran a finger around the edge of the casement, looked up and around—at what, he couldn’t see.
“How did you find out, Bren-ji?”
“I opened a window to look out. The power came back on. The alarm went off. I take it that’s an old system.”
“It certainly is,” Jago said. “Did you report this?”
“It woke the whole staff.”
Jago didn’t look happier, but what she saw, examining the window, he couldn’t tell.
“Except Banichi,” he said.
“Except Banichi.”
“I don’t know where he was. I told you. We had an argument. He went off somewhere.” He had an entirely unwelcome thought but kept his mouth shut on it, watched while Jago walked to the door, pulled it half-shut, and looked at the wall behind it, still frowning. Security didn’t talk about security. He doubted an explanation was forthcoming.
“Nadi Jago,” he said. “Banichi wasn’t here. Do you have any notion where he was last night?”
He might have remarked it was raining outside. Jago’s expression never varied. She opened the door again to its ordinary position, walked out and into the reception room.
The lights went out again. He looked up in frustration, then followed her into the other room to protest the silence and the confusion of his security. She was at the window. She unlatched the side panel, opened it and shut it again, without an alarm.
“What in hell’s going on, Jago?”
Jago took out her pocket-com and thumbed it on, rattled off a string of code he didn’t understand.
Banichi answered. He was relatively certain it was Banichi’s voice. And Jago’s stance showed some small reassurance. She answered, and cut the com off, and put it away.
“It did register,” she said. “Our system registered.”
“Yours and Banichi’s?” he asked—but the com beeped and Jago thumbed it on again and answered it, frowning.
Banichi’s voice replied. Jago’s frown deepened. She answered Banichi shortly, a sign-off, clipped the corn to her belt and headed for the door.
“What was that?” he asked. “What’s happening? Jago?”
She crossed back in two strides, seized his shoulders and looked down at him. “Bren-ji. I’ve never betrayed you. I will not, Bren-ji.”
After which she was out the hall door at the same pace. She shut it. Hard.
Jago? he thought. His shoulders still felt the force of her fingers. And her footsteps were fading at a rapid pace down the hall outside, while he stood there asking himself where Banichi had been last night when he’d set the alarm off.
If there was another system—Banichi had known about him opening that window, if Banichi had been monitoring it. And for whatever reason—Banichi hadn’t come back when the general alarm went.
Maybe because Banichi had already discounted it as a threat. But that wasn’t the Banichi he knew, to take something like that for granted.
It was craziness, from breakfast with the dowager to the television crew arriving in the middle of a security so tight he couldn’t get a telephone. He didn’t like the feeling he was having. He didn’t like the reasons that might make Jago go running out of here, saying, in a language that didn’t have a definite word for trust—trust me to take care of you.
He double-checked the window latch. What kind of person could get in on the upper floor overlooking a sheer drop, he didn’t know, but he didn’t want to find out. He checked the outer door lock, although he’d heard it click.
But what good that was when everyone on staff had keys to the back hall of this place—
He had a sudden and anxious thought, went straight to his bedroom and, on his knees by the bed, reached under the mattress.
The gun Banichi had given him… wasn’t there.
He searched, thinking that the Malguri staff, making the bed, might have shifted it without knowing it was there. He lifted the mattress to be sure—found nothing; no gun, no ammunition.
He let the mattress back down and arranged the bedclothes and the furs—sat down then, on the edge of the bed, trying to keep panic at arm’s length, reasoning with himself that he had as much time to discover the gun missing as they thought it might take him, before they grew anxious; and if they hadn’t devised visual surveillance in the rooms he didn’t know about, whoever had taken it didn’t know yet that he’d discovered the fact.
Fact: someone had it. Someone was armed with it, more to the point, who might or might not ordinarily have access to that issue pistol, or its caliber of ammunition. It was Banichi’s—and if Banichi hadn’t taken it himself, then somebody had a gun with an identification and a distinctive marking on its bullets that could report it right back to Banichi’s commander in the Bu-javid.
No matter what it was used for.
If Banichi didn’t know what had happened—Banichi needed to know it was gone—and he didn’t have a phone, a pocket-com, or any way he knew to get one, except to walk out the door, go violate some security perimeter and hope it was Banichi who answered the alarm.
Which was the plan he had. Not the most discreet way to attract attention.
But, again, so long as he called no one’s bluff—things might stay quiet until Banichi or Jago got back. The missing gun wasn’t a thing to bring to the staff’s attention. He could probably trust Tano and Algini, who’d come with them from Shejidan—but he didn’t know that.
He was rattled. He was tired, after an uneasy night and a nerve-wracking afternoon. He wasn’t, perhaps, making his best decisions—wasn’t up to cleverness, without knowing more than he did.
His nerves twitched to distant thunder—that also was how tired he was. He could go try to trip alarms—but Banichi and Jago were out in the rain, chasing someone, or worse, chasing someone inside the house. His imagination pictured a tank of methane sitting in the basement, someone with explosives—
But they mustn’t deface Malguri. Atevi wouldn’t take that route. Mishidi. Awkward. Messy. No biichi-ji.
So they wouldn’t explode the place. If anything happened, and a bullet turned up where it shouldn’t, with marks that could trace it to Banichi, he could swear to what had really happened.
Unless he was the corpse in question.
Not a good time to go walking the halls, he decided, or startling his own security, who thought they knew where he was. He’d planned to spend the afternoon reading. He found he had no better or wiser plans. He got his dressing gown for a little extra warmth, went back to the sitting-room fire and picked up his book, back in the histories of Malguri.
About atevi. And loyalty. And expectations that didn’t work out.
Expectations on his side, too—about feelings that just weren’t there. Flat weren’t there, and no use—no possibility—of changing anything to do with biology. What could one do? Pour human hormones into atevi bloodstreams, crosswire atevi brains to send impulses atevi brains didn’t have?
And ask how humans had to fail atevi expectations, at what emotional level. There had to be an emotional level.
No. There didn’t have to be. Terracentric thinking again. There was nothing in the laws of the universe that said what let atevi achieve a very respectable society on their own had to have human attributes, or respond when humans tried to attach to them in human ways. In a reasonable universe, it didn’t have to happen; more, in a reasonable universe, it was more reasonable for atevi locomotives to resemble human-built locomotives than for atevi to resemble humans psychologically. Locomotives, designed by whatever species, had tracks for easy rolling, shafts to drive the wheels, steam or diesel, and gears to power the shafts, and a pipe to vent the smoke—that was physics. Airplanes flying through an equal density of air wouldn’t tend to look like locomotives. Rockets wouldn’t resemble refrigerators. Physics had its constraints for machines and structures with one job to do, and physics on old Earth and physics on the earth of the atevi wasn’t a smidge different.
But biology, for intelligent beings with a whole damned lot of jobs to do, with microenvironments, evolutionary pressures, and genetic baroque sifted into the mix—had one hell of a lot of variables in potential makeup.
Not anybody’s fault. Not anybody’s fault they’d come to this star—wormhole, discontinuity of some kind—the physics people had their theories, but no human could prove the cause from where they sat, which was on the far side of God-knew-what galactic disk, for all they knew: no spectrum matched Sol or its neighbors, the pulsars, which the physicists said could peg their location… hadn’t.
They hadn’t known where they were then, and they didn’t know now—as if where they were had any absolute referent when they didn’t know how long it had taken them to get there: hundreds of years in subspace, for all anyone knew—stuck here, able to cobble the station together—
But it was a long, slow haul to the star’s frozen debris belt and back to the life-zone, where they’d built the station: that, the way he’d understood it, had been the real politics, whether to build in the life-zone or at the edge of it; and the life-zone had won out, even knowing it was around a living world, even knowing someday it was going to mean admitting they were making a dangerous choice on very little data…
Political compromise. Accepting a someday problem to solve a near-term worry.
Add in the refinery wreck and the solar storms, which no one at the time knew the limit of, and the attractive planet just lying there under their feet, hell—they’d do no damage, they’d get along, the natives already had steam, they were bound to encounter anyway, and why should they risk their precious lives trying to hold together against the odds.
At least, that was how a descendant nine or so generations down reconstructed the decision-making process… the atevi couldn’t be too different. They had locomotives. They had steam mills. They had industry.
They had one hell of a different hard-wiring, but you couldn’t tell that from the physics they used.
Couldn’t tell that meeting an atevi. Hello, how are you, how’s the weather? Nice people. Arrange a little trade, a little tech for an out-of-season game animal or two…
Right bang into the cultural rift.
Try to settle it—make it right with the local leaders: right into the cultural whirlpool.
Count the ways the first settlement had screwed it up. Count the ways they’d gotten good and deep into the interface before they’d begun to figure out betrayal wasn’t betrayal and murder wasn’t murder and that you couldn’t promote one local aiji and fight another one without involving a continent-spanning Association with everything that conflict dragged into it. You didn’t expect a steam-powered civilization to have world government…
But, then, if you were an early human colonist, maybe you didn’t expect anyone to behave in any way you wouldn’t.
Fifty years and two paidhiin ago, Mospheira had taken a collective deep breath and thrown satellite communications and rocket science onto the table, with the fervent hope that by hooking it to advanced communications, biichi-ji and kabiu together would keep some enterprising atevi entity from combining the explosive with the propellant technology and blowing their rivals to hell.
Because they thought now they’d gotten to know the atevi.
God help fools and tourists.
He flipped an unread page of the history, realized he hadn’t read it, and flipped it back again, trying to concentrate on the doings of aijiin and councillors long since drifting on the Malguri winds, washed into its soil with the rains, down to the sea from Lake Maidingi rather more rapidly in this season than in fall.
He was bitterly angry and his mind was wandering, back and forth inside known limits, like a caged creature, when the real answers had to lie outside the bars of his understanding.
Maybe it was a point all paidhiin got to. Maybe he was the most naive, maybe because he’d gone into a relationship with the most friendly of aijiin, and it was so damned easy to ignore the warnings in every text he’d ever studied and fall right into the same trap as the first humans on the planet… expecting atevi to be human. Expecting atevi to do what one naturally expected nice, sane human people to do and, God help him twice, what he wanted atevi to do, what he emotionally needed atevi to do, instead of himself waking up, paying attention to danger signals, and doing the job he’d been sent here for.
He should have made that phone call, back in Shejidan, if he’d had to make it with Bu-javid guards battering down the door. He shouldn’t be thinking, even at this hour, that Tabini was under some sort of pressure and desperately needed him back in Shejidan, because if that was the case, then the television network Tabini tightly managed wouldn’t be looking for interviews to prove the paidhi was a nice, easy-going friendly fellow, not some shadow-villain plotting world domination or contriving death-rays to level cities.
I will not betray you, Bren-ji?
What in hell did that mean, before Jago lit out the door and down the hall at the next thing to a dead run? And where’s the gun, Jago? Where is Banichi’s gun?
The logs burned down and fell, showering sparks up the flue. He put on another, and settled back to his book.
Not a word back from Banichi or Jago about what was wrong out there—whether someone had breached the security perimeter, or whether someone odd had simply arrived at the airport or whether they’d had some dire word from Tabini.
He flipped the page, figured out he’d stopped reading the second time somewhere in the middle of it, and turned it back, with a dogged effort to concentrate on the text, in atevi directions, and to make sense out of the antique, ornate type style.
The lights went on again, out again.
Damn, he thought, and looked at the window. The rain was down to spatters now, gray cloud and a scattering of bright drops on the glass. The candles cast a golden glow. White light came from the window, as if the clouds were finally thinning up there.
He laid the book down, got up with the intention of having a look at the weather—heard someone in his bedroom and saw Djinana coming through from the back hall.
“The transformer or a bad wire?” he asked Djinana conversationally.
“One hopes, a wire,” Djinana said, and bowed, at the door. “Nadi, a message for you.”
Message? In this place of no telephones?
Djinana offered him a tiny scroll—Ilisidi’s seal and ribbon, he judged before he even looked, because the red and black was Tabini’s house. He opened it with his thumbnail, wondering was it something to do with the after-breakfast engagement. A cancellation, perhaps, or postponement due to the weather.
I need to speak with you immediately, it said. I’ll meet you in the downstairs hall, It had Cenedi’s signature.