If Ilisidi was following any established trail at all, Bren couldn’t see it even when Nokhada was in Babs’ very tracks. He spotted Ilisidi high up among towering boulders, Babs moving like one of Malguri’s flitting ghosts past gaps in the rocks.
He didn’t see the crest of the hill—he only lost track of Ilisidi and Cenedi at the same moment, and, following them, at the head of their column of twenty-odd riders, came out on a windy, boulder-littered hillside above a shallow brook and a set of brush-impeded wheel-ruts.
The road? he asked himself.
Was that track the west road Cenedi had talked about, where they were to meet the rest of their party?
Other riders arrived at the crest of the hill behind him, and Cenedi sent a rider down to, as he heard Cenedi say, see whether they saw any recent tracks.
Machine-tracks, that specific word implied.
A truck could possibly survive that road, given a good suspension and heavy tires.
And if service trucks were all the opposition had at their disposal, and they didn’t take a plane out of Maidingi Airport, God, Ilisidi could lead them back over the ridge mecheita-back and outrun any pursuit afoot.
So their means of transport out of Malguri wasn’t crazy. This wasn’t Mospheira’s well-developed back country. There wasn’t a phone line or a power line or a paved road or a rail track for days.
They sat up on their mountainside and waited, while the man Cenedi had sent rode down, had his look, and rode uphill again, with a hand signal that meant negative.
Bren let go a breath, and his heart sank in suppositions and suspicions too ready to leap up. He was ready to object that, considering the fight back at Malguri, they couldn’t hold Banichi to any tight schedule, and they shouldn’t go on without waiting.
But Cenedi said, before he had a chance to object, that they should get down and wait.
That bettered his opinion of Cenedi. He felt a hundredfold happier with present company and their priorities, in that light, whatever motivated them. He began to get down, the way Cenedi had said, attempted with kicks to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, but that wasn’t a proposition Nokhada seemed to favor. Nokhada ripped the rein forward with an easy toss of her head, sent pain knifing through his sprained shoulder and circled perversely on the slope until her head was uphill and he couldn’t get down over the increased height, in the condition his legs were in, damn the creature.
He kicked Nokhada. They made one more embarrassing and vainly contested three-sixty on the hillside.
At which point one of the other riders took pity on him and got down to take Nokhada’s rein.
“Nand’ paidhi.” It was the same man, he realized by the voice, who’d beaten hell out of him in the restroom, who faced Nokhada sideways, with the dismount-side to the upslope of the hill, then stood waiting to steady him as he slid down.
He wasn’t damned well ready to forgive anyone who’d helped in that charade last night.
But he wasn’t among enemies, either, that was the whole point of what Cenedi had been trying to determine; and the man hadn’t in point of fact beaten him unnecessarily, only dissuaded him from further contest.
So he gave up his quarrel and surrendered his grudge with a quiet, “Thank you, nadi,” and slid down and dropped.
He’d thought he could at least stand up. The knees went—he’d have been down the slope under Nokhada, except for Cenedi’s man keeping him upright, and sensation arrived in his lower body about the same moment his legs straightened.
He managed to take Nokhada’s rein into his own hand and, with a mumbled thanks for the rescue, to limp aside to a place to be alone and to sit down. It was a very odd pain, he thought—not quite bad, at one moment, blood getting back where it belonged, or flesh figuring out there was supposed to be more of it over certain previously undiscovered bones in the human anatomy.
But he decided he didn’t want to sit down at the moment. His eyes watered in the chill wind, and he wiped them, using the arm he hadn’t just wrenched getting down. For a moment he was temporally lost—flashed on the cellar and on remembered anger and went dizzy and uncertain of time-sense as he looked down the slope. He settled for shifting from one foot to the other as a way to rest, holding Nokhada’s rein while Nokhada lowered her head and rooted with metal-capped tusks after a small woody shrub until it gave up its grip on the hillside. Nokhada manipulated it in her muscular upper lip and happily destroyed it.
Cold helped the pain. He just wanted to stand there mindlessly and watch Nokhada kill shrubs, but conscious thought kept creeping in—about the road down there, and the chance Banichi and Jago might not have made it away from Malguri.
The chance also that Ilisidi’s position wasn’t a simple or even a settled question. She was absolutely a wild card, dangerous to everyone with the Association trying, as it was, to fragment. It was only the fact that they were waiting for Banichi and waiting with a great deal of patience, for atevi, that persuaded him that he was in safe hands at all. Being atevi, Cenedi could return to his project of last night and peel another layer of truth out of him without a qualm if he needed to, at any moment, because, being atevi, Cenedi held his morality was Ilisidi’s welfare—consideration of which could shift any time the wind shifted.
How many people on Mospheira, nand’ paidhi?
He earnestly wished he had the gun from his bedroom—but that hadn’t been in the kit Djinana gave him, he’d felt the weight of it, and he didn’t know where it had ultimately gone.
Back to Banichi, he hoped, before it turned up in evidence in some court case Tabini-aiji couldn’t prevent.
A scatter of pebbles came down the slope—a riderless mecheita was rooting after something up above. Nokhada hardly twitched an ear, busy chewing.
Then every mecheita’s ears came up, and the heads came up, the whole lot of them looking toward the bottom of the hill, where the curve of the slope hid the farther end of the road.
Men all around him ducked into cover behind the rocks. Cenedi arrived in two fast strides, jerked him away from Nokhada and jerked him down with him behind the shelter of a targe lump of stone.
He heard an engine then, in all that silence. At the first intimation of danger, the riderless mecheiti had tended together with Babs, and Ilisidi kept hold of Babs—holding the whole pack together on the slope above them.
The engine grew louder, nearer.
Cenedi signaled a query from another man with a hand motion to stay down.
Something rattled and popped and echoed, over the hills.
What was that? Bren wondered for half a heartbeat.
Then he heard the thump of an explosion. Muscles jerked, and his heart began to beat heavily in fright as Cenedi retreated from the post he had and moved rapidly from cover to cover, directing the company back uphill to the mecheiti.
They were leaving—pulling out. That rattle was gunfire; he knew it when that sound repeated itself. An exchange of fire. Cenedi had signaled him first of all. He felt a tremor in his legs he put down to sheer terror. He read Cenedi’s signal in retrospect, but he kept hoping for Banichi and Jago to appear from around the hill.
They couldn’t leave now, so close—if people were shooting, they were shooting at enemies, and that meant Banichi and Jago were there, just beyond the hill, that close to them…
A veil of black smoke rolled along the road below, carried on a stiff wind. In it, from the edge of the hill, he saw someone running, a single black-uniformed figure—
Not an attack, only a single atevi headed around the rocks and then uphill toward them at a desperate, stumbling run—a lighter someone than the average atevi man.
Jago, he realized in a heartbeat; and sprang up and ran, loosing small landslides of gravel, slipping and sliding and losing skin on his hands. He met her halfway to the bottom, dusty, gasping for breath as she caught herself against a boulder.
“Ambush,” she breathed, “at the Spires. Get up there! Tell Cenedi go, get clear! Now!”
“Where’s Banichi?”
“Go, dammit! The tank’s blown, it’s afire, he can’t walk, he’ll hold them till you get a start—”
“Hell! What, hold them? Is he coming?”
“He can’t, dammit. Bren-ji,—”
He didn’t listen to atevi logic. He lit out running, down to the brush-choked road, down into the smoke. He heard Jago running behind him, swearing at him and telling him he was a fool, get back, don’t risk himself.
Then he heard riders following. He skidded in the pebbles on the last of the slope and ran, catching at a boulder to make the sudden turn onto the road, into the smoke, afraid of the mecheiti running him down, afraid most of all of Cenedi catching him, forcing a retreat and leaving Banichi behind for no damn reason.
He felt heat in the smoke, saw a hot red center in the black, rolling cloud that turned into the burning skeleton of a truck with the doors open. The rattle of gunfire echoed off the surrounding hills, and amid that, he heard the sharp report of gunfire close at hand, from the area around the truck.
“Banichi!” he yelled, rubbing tears and soot, trying to make out detail through the stinging smoke. He saw something dark against the gray of the rocks, off the road, a black figure aiming a pistol up at the hills. Dirt kicked up around him, an explosion of gravel—a shot hitting the ground—and he ran for that figure, with the smoke for his only cover. Chips exploded off the rocks ahead of him. One stung his leg as he ducked behind the rocks where Banichi sheltered.
“You damned fool!” Banichi yelled at him as he arrived, but he didn’t care. He grabbed Banichi’s sleeve and his arm, trying to pull him up, onto his feet. Banichi was clearly in pain, catching at the rocks and waving him off as pieces exploded off the boulders around them.
They weren’t alone, then—Jago was beside him, grabbing Banichi on the other side, and, overwhelmed with help, Banichi gave up and cooperated with them, the three of them laboring across the ruts, while gunfire broke out loudly on their left, at ground level. Bullets shattered rock and thudded into the burning wreckage of the truck, the heat of the fire blasting breath away and slinging the skin as they crossed the road, using the smoke for cover.
More shots hit the truck. “That’s Cenedi!” Jago gasped. “He’s on the road!”
“Along the stream!” Banichi yelled, limping heavily, taking both of them downslope as, just past the truck, they slid down the bank of the stream, among boulders and knee-deep into cold water, all in a haze of smoke.
Lungs burned. Eyes watered. Bren choked back coughs, hanging onto Banichi, trying to cope with the uneven ground and Banichi’s lurching steps, Jago’s height giving her more leverage on Banichi’s other side.
But they were out of the firing. Coughing and stumbling, they came beyond the area where the bullets were hitting. Banichi slipped to his knees on the stony bank, and, coughing, collapsed on the rocks, trying to get his gun back in its holster.
“Nadi, where are you hit?” Bren asked.
“Not hit,” Banichi said between coughing fits. “They were ready for us. At the Spires. Explosives.—Dammit, is that Cenedi’s lot?”
“Yes,” Jago said shortly, and tried to get Banichi up again. Banichi tried, on one knee. Whatever was wrong, his leg on Jago’s side couldn’t bear his weight, and Bren shoved with all his strength to help Banichi up the bank toward Cenedi’s position in the windborne haze of smoke.
Gunfire kicked up the dirt around them. Bren flung himself down with Banichi and Jago, flattened himself as much as he could among the humped rocks at the edge of the road, expecting a bullet to find his back as round after round kicked up the earth and ricochets went in random directions, chipping rock, disturbing the weeds.
Then a moment’s quiet. He started to get up, and to pull Banichi up with him, but a man came running out of the smoke, and immediately after, two mecheiti, riderless—one caught the man with its head and threw him completely into the air. He landed and the mecheiti were on him, ripping him with their bronze-capped tusks, trampling him under them.
“Move!” Jago yelled, as Banichi flung himself up and forward, and Bren caught him as best he could on the right side. Banichi lost his footing on Jago’s side and cost them more effort to get him up. Mecheiti were coming at them, riderless shapes in the haze. Banichi was yelling something about his gun.
Then another mecheita was into it—Nokhada, ripping with her tusks, spinning and butting and slashing at retreating rumps—it was that fast, and Bren grabbed Banichi by the belt and tried to get him up and out of the road—but another mecheita darted in on Nokhada’s flank, raked Nokhada’s side with a glancing blow; and then, God, Babs was into it, riderless, laying about him at both combatants, forcing them apart, driving Nokhada off the road downslope, Tali off into the smoke, others scattering, as they struggled to get Banichi toward the rocks—the mecheiti had gone amok—and a barrage of fire came from somewhere in the smoke as they reached the boulders at the foot of the hill. Bren heard someone yelling orders to draw back, not to pursue, get the mecheiti.
Another voice shouted, “They’ll be up our backs, nadi!”
“They’ve already radioed!” Banichi yelled as loudly as he could, resting his arms against a boulder. “Dammit! Get out of here!”
“We were clear!” a man protested, Giri turning up at Bren’s elbow, catching at his arm. “Nand’ paidhi, what were you doing?”
“He lost his wits,” Jago said sharply. Giri brushed past Bren, took his place supporting Banichi on that side. Others of their company were arriving out of the smoke, still firing down the road, but nothing seemed to be coming back.
“They’re going to try to get behind us, or they’ve got a van farther back,” he heard Jago say to someone, on a gasped breath. “We’ve got to get out of here—they’ll have called our location in. We’ll have planes in here faster than we can think about it. Those are no amateurs.”
Men were running, sorting out the mecheiti. Bren spotted Nokhada in the milling about and ran and caught Nokhada’s trailing reins—Nokhada had a raking wound down her shoulder, and a bleeding puncture from a blow to the neck, and she resisted any signal to lower a shoulder for him, circling on the pivot of the rein and throwing her head. He tried again, holding on to the mounting-straps with his sore arm, trying not to require anyone’s help.
Someone grabbed him by the right arm, spun him against Nokhada’s shoulder, and hit him in the side of the head—he didn’t even see it coming. He came to bruised and on the stony ground with Jago’s voice in his ear, arguing with someone.
“Tell me what he’s up to!” Cenedi’s voice, then. “Tell me where he thinks he’s going—when the shooting starts, a man takes his real direction—or do they say that in Shejidan?”
His eyes were blurred, his ear was ringing, and he put his hand on a sharp rock, trying to prop himself on the better arm. “He doesn’t know better,” Jago was saying. “I don’t know what he’ll do next, nadi! He’s not atevi! Isn’t that the point of all this?”
“Nadi,” Cenedi said coldly, “inform him what he’ll do next. Next time I’ll shoot him in the knee and not discuss the matter. Take me very seriously.”
A towering shadow came between them and the sun. Babs, and Ilisidi, only watching, while Bren staggered to his feet.
“Aiji-ma,” came Jago’s quiet voice from beside him, and Jago’s hard grip on his arm, pulling him aside. He stood there with the side of his face burning, with hearing dimmed in one ear, as Ilisidi drifted past and Cenedi stalked off from him. “Damned fool!” Jago said with a shake at his arm.
“They’d have left him!”
“Did you hear him?” Another shake at his arm. “He’ll cripple you. It’s not an idle threat!”
Two of Cenedi’s men had caught Nokhada, and brought her, shaking her head and fighting the restraint. He groped after the rein a man offered him, and made a shaken effort to get the stirrup turned to mount—one of them got Nokhada to drop the shoulder, and he got his toe in the stirrup, but he slipped as Nokhada came up, a thorough botch. He hung from the mounting-straps with both feet off the ground, until someone shoved him from below and he landed far enough on to drag himself the rest of the way aboard.
He saw Jago getting onto another of the spares, the last two men mounting up, as Ilisidi started into motion and Nokhada started to move with the group. His vision grayed out on him in the sudden motion—had been graying out since Jago had lit into him, for reasons doubtless valid to her. His hands shook, and balance faltered.
“You stay on,” Jago said, drawing near him. “You stay with the mecheita, do you hear me, nadi?”
He didn’t answer. It made him mad. He could understand Cenedi hitting him, he knew damned well what he’d done in going after Banichi. He’d violated Ilisidi’s chain of command—he’d forced them into a fight Cenedi would have avoided, because Cenedi was looking out for the dowager—and possibly, darker suspicion, because Cenedi would all along as soon leave Banichi and Jago in the lurch and have him completely to himself and the dowager’s politics. Cenedi personally would gladly sell him to the highest bidder, that was the gut-level fear that had sent him down that hill, he thought now, that and the equally gut-level human conviction that the treason he was committing was, humanly speaking, minor and excusable.
It wasn’t, for Cenedi. It wasn’t, for Jago, and that was what he couldn’t understand—or accept.
“Do you hear me, nadi, do you understand?”
“Where’s Algini and Tano?” he challenged her.
“On a boat,” Jago snapped, her knee bumping his, as the mecheiti moved next to each other. “Likewise providing your enemies a target, and a direction you could have gone. But we’ll be damned lucky now if—”
Jago stopped talking and looked skyward. And said a word he’d never heard from Jago.
He looked. His ears were still ringing. He couldn’t hear what she heard.
“Plane,” Jago said, “dammit!”
She reined back in the column as Ilisidi put Babs to a fast jog into the stream and across it, close to the mountain. Nokhada took a sudden notion to overtake the leaders, jostled others despite a hard pull on the rein.
He could hear the plane coming now. There wasn’t anything they could do but get to the most inconvenient angle for it that they could find against the hills, and that seemed to be their leaders’ immediate purpose. It wasn’t a casually passing aircraft. It sounded low, and terror began to increase his heartbeat. He wondered whether Ilisidi and Cenedi were doing the right thing, or whether they should let the mecheiti run free and get into the rocks. It wasn’t damned fair, being shot at without any weapon, any cover, any way to outrun it—it wasn’t anything like kabiu, it wasn’t the way atevi had waged war in the past—he was the object of contention, and it was human tech atevi were aiming at each other, human tactics…
They kept their course along the mountainside, Ilisidi and Cenedi holding a lead Nokhada wasn’t contesting now, the rest of the column behind, strung out along the streamside. Cenedi was worried. He saw Cenedi turn and look back and up at the sky.
The engine sound came clearer and clearer, illegal use, unapproved use, to fire from the air—they’d designed the stall limits to discourage it, considering that Mospheira was situated as it was, easily within reach of small aircraft. They’d kept the speed up, not transferred anything to do with targeting—no fuses, no bomb sights; it was the paidhi’s job to keep a thing like this from happening…
His mind was busy with that train of thought as the plane came down the stream-cut roadway, low, straight at them. Its single engine echoed off the hills. The riders around him drew guns, a couple of them lifted hunting rifles—and he didn’t know to that moment whether atevi had figured out how to mount guns on aircraft, or whether it was only a reckless pilot spotting them and trying to scare them.
The plane’s skin was thin enough bullets might get to the pilot or hit something vital, like the fuel tanks. He didn’t know its design that intimately. It hadn’t been on his watch. Wilson’s, it had probably been Wilson’s tenure…
His heart thudded in panic. Their column had stopped entirely now and faced about to the attack. He held Nokhada on a short rein, while gunfire racketed around him, aimed aloft.
The plane roared over them, and explosions went off in midair, over their heads, making the mecheiti jump and all but bolt. Puffs of smoke lingered after the fireballs. Rocks rolled down the mountain, dislodging slides of gravel.
“Dropping explosives,” he heard someone say.
Bombs. Grenades. Above all, trust that atevi handled numbers. They wouldn’t make that many mistakes. “They haven’t got the timing down,” he said urgently to Banichi, who’d reined in near him. “It blew above us. They’ll figure it. They’ll reset those fuses. We can’t give them any more tries at us.”
“We haven’t got a choice,” Banichi said. Atevi didn’t sweat. Banichi was sweating. His face was a color he’d never seen an atevi achieve, as he methodically shoved in another clip, from the small number remaining on his belt.
The plane was coming around again, and their group moved as Babs started out at a fast pace, descending as the stream-cut road descended. The mecheiti bunched up now, as close as the terrain allowed, trampling shrubs.
Changing the altitude, changing the targeting equation, Bren thought to himself—it was the best thing they could do, besides find cover the land didn’t offer them, while that atevi pilot was trying to work out the math of where his bombs had hit. Somebody behind him was yelling something about concentrating fire on the fusilage and the pilot, not the wings, the fuel tanks were closer in.
It was all crazed. He heard the roar of the engine and looked up as the plane came streaking down at them, this time from the side, over the mountain opposite them, and gave them only a brief window of fire.
Explosions pounded the hill above them and showered them with rock chunks and dirt—Nokhada jumped and threw her head at an enemy she couldn’t reach.
“Getting smart, the bastard,” someone said, and Ilisidi, in the lead, led them quickly around the shoulder of the hill, off the road now, while they could hear the plane coming back again.
Then came a distant rumble out of the south, the sound of thunder. Weather moving in.
Please God, Bren thought. Clouds and cover. He’d nerved himself for the bombs. The prospect of rescue had, his hands trembling and the sweat breaking out under his arms.
Another pass. A bomb hit behind them and set brush burning.
A second plane roared over immediately behind that, and dropped its bombs the other side of the hill,
“There’s two of them,” Giri cried. “Damn!”
“That one’s still figuring it out,” Banichi said. The number one plane was coming back again. They were caught on an open hillside, and Banichi and Jago and Cenedi and the rest of them drew calm aim, tracked it as it came—Cenedi said, at the last moment, “Behind the cowling.”
They opened up, gunfire echoing off the other hill.
The plane roared over and didn’t drop its bombs. It ripped just above the crest of the hill and a second later a loud explosion shook the ground.
Nobody cheered. The second plane was coming in fast and they were on the move again, picking their way over the rocks, traveling as fast as they could. Thunder boomed again. One assumed it was thunder. The second plane came over again and dropped its bombs too soon. They hit the hill crest.
They descended the steep way, then, into a narrow ravine, a smaller window for the plane at its speed than it was for them. They heard a plane coming. Its engine was sputtering as thunder—it had to be thunder—rolled and rumbled in the distance.
That plane’s crippled, Bren thought. Something’s wrong with it. God, there’s hope.
He didn’t think it would drop its bombs. He watched it make its pass in the narrow sky above them.
Then an explosion went off right over them, and Nokhada jumped. A sharp impact hit his shoulder, and the rider next to him went down—he didn’t see why—brush came at his face and he put up a hand to protect himself as Nokhada ran him up the hill and stopped close to Babs.
He was half-deaf from the blast, but not so he couldn’t hear mecheiti screaming in fright or pain. He looked back, saw riders down where he’d been, and tried to turn back. Nokhada had other ideas and fought him on the slope, until other riders went back.
But Banichi was still in sight; he saw Jago among those afoot, heard a single gunshot. The screaming stopped abruptly, leaving the silence and the ringing of his ears; then, after a moment of milling about, and another of Nokhada’s unwilling turn-abouts on the slope, he saw people mounting up again, the column reorganizing itself.
A rider came forward in the line, and reported to Cenedi and Ilisidi three men dead, and one of the names was Giri.
He felt—he didn’t know what, then. An impact to the gut. The loss of someone he knew, a known quantity when so much was changing around him—he felt it personally; but he was glad at the same time it wasn’t Banichi or Jago, and he supposed in a vague, dazed way, that his sense of loss was a selfish judgement, on selfish human standards that had nothing to do with man’chi, or what atevi felt or didn’t feel.
He didn’t know right and wrong any longer. His head ached. His ears were still ringing and there was a stink of smoke and gunpowder in every breath he drew. Dirt had spattered him and Nokhada, even this far up the column, dirt and bits of leaves—he wasn’t sure what else had, and he didn’t want to know. He only kept remembering the shock of the bomb bursting, a wall of air and fragments that made itself one with the explosions on the road—recalled the shock of something hitting his arm with an impact that still ached. It was a fluke, that single accurate bomb. It might not happen again.
Or it might on the next such strike—he didn’t know how much farther they had to ride or how long their enemies could keep putting up planes from Maidingi Airport and hitting at them over and over again, with nothing, nothing they could do about it.
But the second plane didn’t come back, whether it had crashed in the mountains or made it back to the airport, and in the meantime the rumbling of thunder grew louder.
In a while more, clouds swept in, bringing cold air, first, then a spatter of rain, a crack of thunder. The riders around him delved into packs without getting down, pulled out black plastic rain-cloaks and began to settle them on as the drops began to fall. He hoped for the same in his gear, and discovered it in the pack beside his knee, someone’s providence in this season of cold mountain rains. He sorted it out in the early moments of the rain, settled it over his head and over as much of him and the riding-pad as he could, latching it up about his throat as the chill deluge began, blinding him with its gusts and trickling down his neck.
The plastic kept body heat in, his and Nokhada’s, the turbulence and the cloud cover up above the hills was a shield from aircraft, and if he froze where the stiff gusts plastered the plastic against his body or whipped up the edges of it on a shirt and coat beginning to be soaked from the trickle down his neck, any discomfort the storm brought on them was better than being hammered from the air.
For the most part he trusted Nokhada to follow Babs, tucked his hands under his arms and asked himself where Ilisidi’s strength possibly came from, because the more he let himself relax, the more his own was giving way, and the more the shivers did get through. Thin bodies chill faster, Giri had said that, he was sure it had been Giri, who was dead, now, spattered all over a hillside.
His brain kept re-hearing the explosions.
Kept falling into black patches, when he shut his eyes, kept being back in that cellar, listening to the thunder, feeling a gun against his head and knowing Cenedi would do it again and for real, because Cenedi’s anger with humans was tied up with Ilisidi’s ambition and what had and hadn’t been possible for atevi to achieve even before that ship appeared in the skies, he read that much. Cenedi’s man’chi was with Ilisidi, the rebels offered Ilisidi association with them, Ilisidi had told Cenedi find out what the paidhi was, and in Cenedi’s eyes, it was his fault he’d convinced her not to take that rebel offer.
Hence Cenedi’s anger—at him, at Ilisidi’s surrendering her fight for the seat in Shejidan—to age, to time, to God knew what motive. The paidhi had no confidence he could interpret anything, not even himself, lately. He’d become a commodity for trade among atevi factions. He didn’t even know who owned him at the moment—didn’t know why Cenedi had waited on the hill for Banichi.
Didn’t know why Jago had been angry at him, for going after Banichi.
Jago… make a deal with Cenedi? Betray Tabini and Banichi? He didn’t think so.
He refused to think so, for no logical reason, only a human one—which didn’t at all apply to her. He knew that, if he knew nothing else, in the confusion of his thoughts. But he didn’t change his opinion.
Hill after hill after hill in the blinding rain.
Then another deeply cut ravine, where a tall growth of ironheart sheltered them from the blasts, and the thready leaves streamed and clumped with water, dumping it, when they chanced to brush against them, in small, icy floods that found their way down necks, more often than not.
But that cover of brush was the first relief from the wind they’d found, and Ilisidi called a rest and bunched them up, the twelve of them—only twelve surviving riders, he was dismayed to realize, and six mecheid on their own, trailing them through brush and along the stony hillsides. He hadn’t realized the losses, he hadn’t counted… he didn’t know where they might have lost the others, or whether, at some silent signal he’d missed, the party had divided itself.
He held on to the mounting-straps and slid down Nokhada’s wet side, not sure he could get up again unaided, but glad enough to rest. For the first moment he had to stand holding to Nokhada’s harness just to keep his feet, his legs were so rubbery from riding. Lightning flickered and the thunder muttered over their heads. He could scarcely walk on the rain-slick hillside without grabbing onto branches and leaning on one rock and the next. He wandered like a drunken man along the steep slope, seeking a warm spot and a place a little more out of the wind. He saw that Banichi had gotten down—and he worked his way in that direction, where four other men had gathered, with Jago, one of them squatting down beside her and holding Banichi’s ankle. The water-soaked boot was stretched painfully tight over the joint.
“Is it broken, Jago-ji?” he asked, getting down beside her.
“Probably,” she said darkly, not looking at him. By the stablehands’ foresight, she and Banichi both had rain-cloaks, and she huddled in hers, not looking at him, not speaking, not willing to speak; he read that in the shoulder she kept toward him. But it was no place to argue with her, when Banichi was in pain, and everything seemed short-fused.
The man who was dealing with Banichi at least seemed sure of what he was doing—might even be a real medic, Bren thought. Tabini had one in his guard. It made sense the aiji-dowager might take such a precaution, considering her breakneck rides and considering the politics she had a finger in.
“The boot stays on,” Banichi said, to a suggestion they cut it off. “It’s holding it together. I can at least—”
At which the man made a tentative probe that sent Banichi’s head back and his breath hissing through his teeth.
“Sorry,” the man said, and spoke to another of the guards kneeling by him. “Cut me a couple or three splints.”
One more of their company walked up to watch, steps whispering over sodden leaves, disturbing the occasional rock. Jago squatted, blowing on her clasped hands to warm them. Banichi wasn’t enjoying being the center of attention. He ebbed backward onto the ground and lay there staring up into the drizzle, ignoring all of it. The ground chill had to come through the plastic rain-cloak. But the staff’s providence hadn’t extended to blankets, or to tents.
Ilisidi limped over, using her cane, and Cenedi’s arm, on the uneven ground. There ensued another discussion between Ilisidi and the perhaps-medic as to whether Banichi’s ankle was broken; and Banichi, propping himself glumly on his elbows, entered the argument to say it had gone numb when the truck blew up and he’d finished the job when he’d jumped out under fire and hit a rock.
Which was more detail of what had happened in the ambush than he’d yet heard from Banichi.
“Can you walk on it?” Cenedi asked.
“In an emergency,” Banichi said, which proved nothing at all about how bad it was. It was broken, Bren thought. The ankle didn’t rest straight. “Not what I’d choose, nadi. What walking did you have in mind?”
“Outside Maidingi Airport, which seems unavailable, there are two, remotely three ways we can go from here.” Thunder rumbled, and Cenedi waited for it, while the rain fell steadily. “We’d confirmed Wigairiin as reliable, with its airstrip—hence the feints we asked for lakeward and southwest. But our schedule is blown to hell now. The rebels in Maidingi township have no doubt now that our answer to their association is no and that we’re going west. They can’t be so stupid as to forget our association with Wigairiin.”
“North of here,” Banichi said.
“North and west. On the edge of the hills. The rebels are bound to move to take Wigairiin’s airstrip—or to take it out.”
“Foolish to strike at Wigairiin,” Ilisidi said, “until they’re sure both Malguri and Wigairiin aren’t going with them. And they won’t have known that until we went out the stable gate.”
“Not an easy field to take from the air,” Cenedi said. “Expensive to take.”
“Unless they moved in forces overland, in advance of Malguri’s refusal,” Banichi said.
“Possible,” Cenedi said. “But let me tell you our other choices. There’s the border. Fagioni province, just at the foot of Wigairiin height. But it could be a soft border. Damned soft in a matter of hours if Wigairiin falls, and we’re left with the same guess where the border into loyal territory firms up after that if Wigairiin falls. There’s also the open country, if we ignore both Wigairiin and Fagioni township and head into the reserve there. That’s three hundred miles of wilderness, plenty of game. But no cover.”
“More air attacks,” Ilisidi said.
“We might as well resign the fight if we take that route.” Banichi shifted higher, to sit up, winced, and settled on an elbow. “Railhead at Fagioni. They’ll have infiltrated, if they’ve got any sense. Major force is already launched. Rainstorm won’t have stopped the trains. They know we didn’t take the lake crossing. They know the politics on this side. You were the only question, nand’ dowager.”
“So it’s Wigairiin,” Cenedi said.
“There’s south,” Banichi said. “Maidingi.”
“With twelve of us? They’d hunt us out in an hour. We’ve got this storm until dark, if the weather reports hold. That long we’ve got cover. We can make Wigairiin. We can get out of there.”
“In what?” Banichi asked. “Forgive me. A plane that’s a low-flying target?”
“A jet,” Cenedi said.
Banichi frowned and drew in a slow breath, seeming to think about it then. “But what is it,” Banichi asked, “since they took Maidingi? Four, five hours? Tabini has commercial aircraft at his disposal. He might be in Maidingi by now. He could have landed a force at the airport.”
“And the whole rebellion could be over,” Ilisidi said, “but I wouldn’t bet our lives on it, nadiin. The Association is hanging together by a thread of public confidence in Tabini’s priorities. To answer a rising against him with brutal force instead of negotiation, while the axe hangs over atevi heads, visibly? No. Tabini’s made his move, in sending Bren-paidhi to me. If that plane goes out of Wigairiin, if I personally, with my known opposition to the Treaty, deliver the paidhi back to him—the wind is out of their sails, then and there. This is a political war, nadiin.”
“Explosives falling on our heads, nand’ dowager, were not a sudden inspiration. They were made in advance. The preparation to drop them from aircraft was made in advance. Surely they informed you the extent of their preparations.”
“Surely my grandson informed you,” Ilisidi said, “nadi, the extent of his own.”
What are we suddenly talking about? Bren asked himself. What are they asking each other?
About betrayal?
“As happens,” Banichi said, “he informed us very little. In case you should ask.”
My God.
“We go to Wigairiin,” Cenedi said. “I refuse, with ’Sidi’s life, to bet on Maidingi, or what Tabini may or may not have done.”
“I have to leave it to you,” Banichi said with a grimace and a shift on the elbow. “You know this area. You know your people.”
“No question, then,” Ilisidi said, and punctuated it with a stab of her walking-stick at the sodden ground. “Tonight. If this rain keeps up—it’s not an easy airfield in turbulence, Cenedi assures me. Not at all easy when they’re shooting at you from the ground. If we get there we can hold the airstrip with two rifles, take the rest of the night off, and radio my lazy grandson to come get us.”
“I’ve flown in there,” Cenedi said. “Myself. It’s a narrow field, short, single runway, takeoffs and landings right out over a cliff, past a steep rock where snipers can sit. The house is a seventeenth-century villa, with a gravel road down to Fagioni. The previous aiji was too aristocratic to fly over to Maidingi to catch the scheduled flights. She had the airstrip built, knocked down a fourteenth century defense wall to do it.”
“Hell of a howl from the Preservation Commission,” Ilisidi said. “Her son maintains the jet and uses it. It seats ten. It can easily handle our twelve, Cenedi’s rated for it, and it’s going to be fueled.”
“If,” Cenedi said, “if the rebels haven’t gotten somebody in there. Or sent them down, as you say, into Fagioni, to come up overland. If we have to scramble to take that field, nadiin, will you be with us? That’s the walk that could be necessary.”
“No question,” Banichi said glumly. “I’m with you.”
“None,” said Jago.
“The paidhi will take orders,” Cenedi said.
“I,” Bren started to answer, but Jago hit his knee with the back of her hand. “The paidhi,” she said coldly, “will do what he’s told. Absolutely what he’s told.”
“I—” He began to object on his own behalf, that he understood that, but Jago said, “Shut the hell up, nadi.”
He shut up. Jago embarrassed him. The anger and tension between Banichi and Cenedi was palpable. He looked at the rain-soaked ground and watched the raindrops settle on last year’s fallen leaves and the scattered stones, while they discussed the geography of Wigairiin, and the airstrip, and the aiji of Wigairiin’s ties to Ilisidi. Meanwhile the putative medic had brought his splints, three straight sticks, and elastic bandage, and proceeded to wrap Banichi’s ankle—‘Tightly, nadi,“ Banichi interrupted the strategy session to say, and the medic said shortly he should deal with what he knew about.
Banichi frowned and leaned back, then, because it seemed to hurt, and was out of the discussion, while Jago asked pointed questions about the lay of the land.
There was an ancient wall on the south that cut off the approach to Wigairiin, with a historic and functional iron gate; but they didn’t expect it to be shut against them. Just before that approach, they were going to send the mecheiti with one man, around the wall, north and east, to get them home to Malguri.
Why not stable them at Wigairiin? Bren asked himself. Why not at least have them for a resource for escape if things went wrong there, and they had to get away?
For a woman who seemed to know a lot about assaulting fortresses, and a lot about airstrips and strategy—removing that resource as a fall-back seemed a stupid idea. Cenedi letting her order it seemed more stupid than that, and Banichi and Jago not objecting to it—he didn’t understand. He almost said something himself, but Jago had said shut up, and he didn’t understand what was going on in the company.
Best ask later, he thought.
The dowager valued Babs probably more than she did any of them. That part was even understandable to him. She was old. If anything happened to Babs, he thought Ilisidi might lose something totally irreplaceable in her life.
Which was a human thing to think. In point of any fact when he was dealing with atevi feelings, he didn’t know what Ilisidi felt about a mecheiti she’d attacked a man for damaging. Forgetting that for two seconds was a trap, a disturbing, human miscalculation, right at the center of a transaction that was ringing alarm bells up and down his spine, and he couldn’t make up his mind what was going on with the signals he was getting from Banichi and Jago. God, what was going on?
But he couldn’t put it together without understanding what Ilisidi’s motive was, what she valued most, what she was logical about and what she wouldn’t be.
On such exaggerated threads his mind was running, chasing down invalid chains of logic, stretching connections between points that weren’t connected, trying to remember what specific and mutable points had persuaded him to believe what he believed was true—the hints of motivation and policy in people who’d been lying to him when they told him the most basic facts he’d believed.
Go on instinct? Worst, worst thing the paidhi could ever do for a situation. Instinct was human. Feelings were human. Reasonable expectations were definitely human…
Ilisidi said they should get underway, then. It was a good fifty miles, atevi reckoning, and she thought they could get there by midnight.
“Speed’s what we can do,” she said, “that these city-folk won’t expect. They don’t think in terms of mecheiti crossing hills like this that fast. Damn lot they’ve forgotten. Damn lot about this land they never learned.”
She leaned on her cane, getting up. He wanted to believe in Ilisidi. He wanted to trust the things she said. Emotionally… based in human psyche… he wanted to think she loved the land and wanted to save it.
Intellectually, he wanted answers about sending the mecheiti back to Malguri—where there were, supposedly, rebels having breakfast off the historic china.
He didn’t get up with the rest. He waited until the medic packed up and moved off.
“Banichi-ji,” he said on his knees and as quietly as he could. “She’s sending the mecheiti away. We might still need them. Is this reasonable, nadi-ji?”
Banichi’s yellow eyes remained frustratingly expressionless. He blinked once. The mouth—offered not a thing.
“Banichi. Why?”
“Why—what?”
“Why did Tabini do what he did? Why didn’t he just damn ask me where I stood?”
“Go get on, nadi.”
“Why did you get mad when I came to help you? Cenedi would have left you, with no help, no—”
“I said, Get on. We’re leaving.”
“Am I that totally wrong, Banichi? Just answer me. Why is she sending the mecheiti back, before we know we’re safe?”
“Get me up,” Banichi said, and reached for Jago’s hand. Bren caught the other arm, and Banichi made it up, wobbly, testing the splinted ankle. It didn’t work. Banichi gasped, and used their combined help to hobble over to his mecheita and grab the mounting-straps.
“Banichi-ji.” It was the last privacy he and Banichi and Jago might have for hours, and he was desperate. “Banichi, these people are lying to us. Why?”
Banichi looked at him, and for one dreadful moment, he had the feeling what it must be to face Banichi… professionally.
But Banichi turned then, grasped the highest of the straps on the riding-pad, and with a jump that belied his size and weight, managed to get most of the way up without even needing the mecheita to drop the shoulder. Jago gave him the extra shove that put him across the pad and Banichi caught up the rein, letting the splinted leg dangle.
Banichi didn’t need his help. Atevi didn’t have friends, atevi left each other to die. The paidhi was supposed to reason through that fact of life and death and find a rationale other humans could accept to explain it all.
But at the moment, with bruises wherever atevi had laid hands on him, the paidhi didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, refused to understand why Banichi should have died back there, for no damned reason, or why Banichi was lying to him, too.
Men were getting up, ready to move out. If he wasn’t on Nokhada, Nokhada would leave him, he had no doubt of it, they’d have to come back to get the reason—he still supposed—of this whole exercise, and nobody was going to be damned happy with him. He quickened his pace, limped across the slant of the hill and caught Nokhada.
Then he heard the tread of someone leading a mecheita in his tracks across the sodden leaves. He faced around.
It was Jago. A very angry Jago. “Nadi,” she said. “You don’t have the only valid ideas in the world. Tabini-ji told you where to be, what to do. You do those things.”
He shoved up the rain-cloak plastic and the sleeve of his coat, showing the livid marks still on his wrist. “That, for their hospitality last night, that, for the dowager’s questions—which I’ve answered, Jago-ji, answered well enough that they believe me. It’s not my damn fault, whatever’s going on. I don’t know what I’ve done since the dowager’s apartment, that you look at me like that.”
Jago slapped him across the face, so hard he rocked back against Nokhada’s ribs.
“Do as you’re told!” Jago said. “Do I hear more questions, nadi?”
“No,” he said, tasting blood. His eyes were watering. Jago walked off from him in his blurred vision and got on her mecheita, her back to him the while.
He hit Nokhada harder than his wont. Nokhada dropped her shoulder and stayed down until he had his foot in the stirrup and landed astride. He kicked blindly, angrily, after the stirrup, fought the rain-cloak out of his way as he felt Nokhada jolt into motion. A low vine raked his head and defensive arm.
Jago hadn’t hit with all her force—left the burn of her hand on his face, but that was nothing. It was the anger— hers and his, that found a vital, painful spot and dug in deep.
He didn’t know what he’d said—or done. He didn’t know how he’d come to deserve her temper or her calculated spite, except Jago didn’t like the questions he’d asked Banichi. He’d trod on something, a saner voice tried to say to him. He might have vital keys if he shut down any personal feeling, remembered exactly what he’d asked, or exactly what anyone had said. It was his job to do that. Even if atevi didn’t want him doing it. Even if he wasn’t going to get where they promised him he was going.
He lost the hillside a moment. He was on Ilisidi’s balcony, in the biting wind, in the dark, where Ilisidi challenged him with facts, and the truth that he couldn’t trust now to be the truth, the way he couldn’t pull the pieces of recent argument out of his memory.
He was on the mountain, alone, seeing only the snow—
On the rain-drenched hillside, with Jago deserting Banichi, cursing him for going after her own partner—and in the smoke, with the ricocheting bullets left and right of him.
The cellar swallowed him, a moment of dark, of helpless terror—he didn’t know why the images tumbled one over the other, flashed up, replacing the rainy thicket and the sight of Ilisidi and Cenedi ahead of him.
The shock of last night had set in—a natural reaction, he told himself, like the details of an accident coming back, replaying themselves over what was going on around him—only he wasn’t doing it in safety. There wasn’t any safety anywhere around him. There might never be again, only the bombs had stopped falling, and he had to focus and deal with what was ringing alarm bells through the here and now.
Banichi had challenged Ilisidi on the preparation of those bombs for a reason.
Banichi wasn’t a reckless man. He’d been probing for something, and he’d gotten it: Ilisidi had come back on him with a What do you know? and Banichi had claimed to know nothing of Tabini’s plans, implicitly challenging Ilisidi again to take him to that cellar and see what they could get.
Where was Banichi’s motive in the confrontation? Where was Ilisidi’s in the question, with so much tottering uncertain?
Putting Tabini’s intentions in question…
God, the mind was going. He was losing the threads. They were multiplying on him, his thoughts darting this way and that way… not making sense and then making him terribly, irrationally afraid he still hadn’t figured the people he was with.
Jago hadn’t backed Banichi, anywhere in the argument. Jago had attacked him, told him to shut up, followed him across the hill to say exactly what she’d already told him and then hit him in the face. Hard.
Nobody had objected to Jago hitting him. Ilisidi hadn’t. Banichi hadn’t. They’d surely seen it. And nobody stopped her. Nobody objected. Nobody cared, because the human in the party didn’t read the signals and maybe everybody else knew why Jago had done it.
The threads kept running, proliferating, tangling. The dark was all around him for a moment, and he lost his balance—caught himself, heart thumping, with a hand on Nokhada’s rain-wet shoulder.
It was the cellar again. He heard footsteps, but they were an illusion, he knew they were. He’d taken a knock on the head and it hurt like hell, shooting pains through his brain. The footsteps went away when he insisted to see the storm-gray of the hills, to feel the cold drops off the branches above him trickling down his neck. Nokhada’s jarring gait scarcely hurt him now.
But Banichi was alive. He’d made that choice, whatever atevi understood. He couldn’t have gone off and left him and Jago, to go off with Ilisidi—he didn’t know what part of a human brain had made that decision, the way atevi didn’t consciously know why they, like mecheiti, darted after the leader, come hell come havoc—he hadn’t thought, hadn’t damned well thought about the transaction, that the paidhi’s life was what aijiin were shooting each other for. It hadn’t mattered to him, in that moment, running down that slope, and he still didn’t know that it mattered—not to Tabini, who could get a replacement for him in an hour, who wasn’t going to listen to him in anyone else’s hands, and who wasn’t going to pay a damn thing to get him back, so the joke was on the people who thought he would. He didn’t know anything. It was all too technical—so that joke was on them, too.
The only thing he had of value was in the computer—which he ought to drop into the nearest deep ravine, or slam onto a rock, except it wouldn’t take out the storage—and if they collected it, it wasn’t saying atevi experts couldn’t get those pieces to work. And experts weren’t the people he wanted to have their hands on it.
He should have done a security erase. If he’d had the power to turn it on.
God, do what to save that situation, tip them off it was valuable? Make an issue, then botch getting rid of it?
Just leave it in the bag, let Nokhada carry it back to Malguri?
The rebels were sitting in Malguri.
Dark. The steps coming and going.
The beast on the wall. Lonely after all these centuries.
He couldn’t talk to Banichi. Banichi couldn’t walk, couldn’t fight them—he couldn’t believe Banichi lying back like that, resigning the argument and all their lives to Cenedi.
But Cenedi was a professional. Like Banichi. Maybe together they understood things he couldn’t.
Jago crossed the width of the hill to blame him and hit him in the face.
Cold and dark. Footsteps in the hall. Voices discussing having a drink, fading away up the steps.
A gun was against his skull and he thought of snow, snow all around him. And not a living soul. Like Banichi. Just shut it out.
Give it up.
He didn’t understand. Giri was dead. Bombs just dropped and spattered pieces all over the hill, and he didn’t know why, it didn’t make any sense why a bomb fell on one man and not another. Bombs didn’t care. Killing him must be as good as having him, in the minds of their enemies.
Which wasn’t what Cenedi had said.
There began to be a sea-echo in his skull, the ache where Cenedi had hit him and the one where Jago had, both gone to one pain, that kept him aware where he was.
In his own apartment, before Cenedi’s message had come, before she’d left, Jago had said… I’ll never betray you, nadi Bren.
I’ll never betray you…