Supper was solitary. Algini was on duty, Tano was still out seeing to something regarding the clerical office, which had occupied an inordinate amount of Tano's time. Neither Banichi nor Jago was available yet, and by no i means would Saidin sit down to table in front of the staff. Everything he wondered about seemed negative. He still had a difficult letter to phrase to Ilisidi, he hadn't had a reply to his message to Tabini, he hadn't gotten the anticipated message from Jase, and he told himself that if he hadn't it wasn't Jase's personal decision; no, that level of responsibility was ultimately by the decision of the ship's captain, possibly the occupation of ship's communications in hot and heavy conspiracy with Mospheira, and it wasn't exactly politic to call the ship and ask whether Jase was available, like some stiffed and forgotten assignation.
Not politic, though an option at this point; but, always to take into account, he spoke for Tabini, at least until arrested, and if Jase missed appointments it wasn't the paidhi's job to cajole Jase into keeping them. The paidhi's job was to report the missed communication to Tabini, which he had done, translate Tabini's response, which he hadn't yet received, always supposing Tabini wasn't trying to restrain his temper and weigh the paidhi's value future and present before ordering him dropped into a quiet place out of the way of trouble.
Harm him — he didn't think so. But he'd given Tabini one hell of a headache, and reason to think that the human advice he'd had wasn't that reliable.
He hoped the Jase Graham matter and the whole agreement with the ship wasn't becoming one more item to blow up in his face today, unraveled by better bribes from Mospheira. It would total out his account with no few skeptics in the hasdrawad and the tashrid, and if he could guess a reason for the prolonged silence, he'd bet Phoenix was using whatever means it had to discover what Mospheira did have.
If he had to place an interpretation on Graham's missing two days contacting him, they coincided well with Mospheira's new proposal, and he didn't expect the diplomatic obstacles at this point to fall like dominoes: things didn't work that way, not with so many interests to protect.
Which meant, given the initiative toward the ship might fail, the Mospheiran initiative and his offer of cooperation with the President might fail.
In which case — back to square one, with vastly damaged credibility, even granted Tabini left him in charge of anything. If they had to go back to negotiations, Tabini wouldn't budge from what he saw as already his — though Tabini might sound as if he were budging — and come after the matter from a new vantage, one of those small privileges of a leader with consensus pre-voted and as yet unwavering. And he might want to cut off communications for a while. Not what the paidhi would suggest. But —
Maybe — maybe the ship had found some technical glitch in the lander. Maybe they found their target date slipping for safety reasons and they were waiting for reports.
Maybe it just took a long time to analyze the imaging he was sure they were using.
One certainly had to ask what the captain's motives were for speaking so frankly with Mospheira, considering he had to know the mainland picked up the conversations. They could encode, he was relatively certain, using things the Defense Department knew and he didn't.
But the ship didn't do that, unless there was something going through the telemetry.
He could think himself in circles. Nothing was worse than sitting in an informational blackout.
He held himself to tea, not liquor, told himself even the quantity of what he'd been pouring down wasn't without effect on the nerves, and he had to stop gulping entire cups of it as the only relief from thought and action — tea that lacked alkaloids was still native to the planet and contained minute amounts of stimulant that could add up.
But, damn, it did keep the mouth from drying. He thought of asking for it iced, which would scandalize the house — and wished the weather would take that pending turn to cooling. The active sea-winds of morning had become a sultry Shejidan night, and good as the concealed ventilation generally was, he longed for autumn, when he could pile blankets on the bed and sleep the night through. Sleep was increasingly attractive, even lying abed was — and he still had to draft that letter to Ilisidi.
"Nand' paidhi," a servant came to the tableside to say, "nand' paidhi, the telephone."
Jase, he thought, and left his chair in haste. His glum mood evaporated — he was ready to get on with the business of the ship, the site, the landing, the whole future that otherwise he couldn't deal with.
"Bren?"
Barb.
"Hello? Bren?"
It took a second to catch his breath, switch mental gears, switch languages so he could think what Barb wanted. "Yeah," he said.
"Bren, what's the matter?"
'There's nothing the matter."
"You asked me to go over to your mother's."
He remembered. He remembered the conversation with Toby, which didn't rest in the same memory area with Tabini, Ilisidi, and Jase Graham. "Yeah."
"Bren, are we all right to talk?"
"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."
"She's all right. A little spooked. Somebody wrote some letters, somebody kept calling on the phone, leaving messages on the system, got some of her private numbers."
"Private numbers."
"Just things they shouldn't have accessed. She said she was all right. The police are on to it."
Things they shouldn't have accessed. Access numbers. Access to systems. Not random off-the-street trouble, then. That smelled like the Heritage agitators. Connections. Professionals, who'd ring your phone and drive you crazy. "Yeah. Yes. You tell her I'm fine?"
"Sure." A silence followed. "So how are you?"
"Fine."
"You sounded a little vague when you picked up."
"I suppose I did. I was expecting a business call. Sorry."
"So how are you?"
"The cast is off. No real problems. Thanks for chasing that down."
"Yeah, thanks, Bren."
"So how are you getting along?"
"Fine." Another small silence. "I sort of expected you to call me."
He didn't know what he'd heard for a moment. He replayed it twice in his head and drew a measured breath.
"Bren?"
"Barb, there is no choice. There is no choice. I won't be calling you. You did what you had to do, I think you did the right thing —" He found a certainty in his own mind that he wasn't going back to Mospheira again. Not soon. Or not the same.
But he couldn't say it. Not to Barb. Not to Shawn. He couldn't let them draw the conclusion, or Tabini lost his fair broker. "I think you ought to work on it, give it a chance. Paul's a nice guy."
"I love you, Bren."
It wasn't even painful to hear that maneuver, except in the response and comfort-giving it asked of him. And in what it said about her that he'd never wanted to face. That had rung alarm bells the last time they'd talked. And the timing of the phone calls. And her message to him after he'd left. And her not showing up at the hospital. He'd thought in her turning away from him she was giving him the reality dose. He doubted all of a sudden that she had it to give.
"Bren?"
Tears. He heard the quaver.
"I can't help you," he said. "I can't fix it. You hear me?"
"Bren. You don't know what it's like, you don't know, you've got the whole government around you, and we protect you from it, everybody protects you from it, because you come home to rest, but we live with it, we live with it all the time, your mother's scared to answer her phone, your brother's scared — they're saying you've gone over, they're saying you're selling us out, and people believe it — people at work believe it, and it's our fault, isn't it? And we're left here shaking our heads and saying, Oh, no, Bren's not like that, Bren wouldn't do that, Bren'sjust getting what he can get — but I've got reporters ringing my phone, I've got messages stacked up on the system, my parents are scared —"
"All the more reason to keep your distance from me."
"They say you're not coming home."
"Who says that?"
"People. Just people."
"I'm doing my job, Barb. Same as always." He hadn't been in the habit of lying to Barb. It was one more curtain falling. It was no worse for his mother or Toby than he'd already found out. That they hadn't come to the hospital began to make a certain amount of sense. And maybe it was a good reason and a good time to say a firm goodbye. Leave the game to those who had signed on for it. "You take care, Barb. Don't pay attention to fools. Don't tolerate them, either. If you're getting those calls, you call the police."
I have. A lot of times you don't know about. I mean, a long time before this, Bren. A lot of times."
"Best I can do, Barb. Best I can say. I won't be calling. Hear? Don't put off the rest of your life. You made a good decision. Stick by it."
"Don't talk to me like that!"
"You know Wilson. That's my reality. It's not yours."
"Dammit, no — Bren, don't you hang up on me!"
"Don't overdramatize, Barb. It won't work. Good night, see you sometime, get it straightened out."
Her phone slammed down.
Good, he thought, and stood there a moment, aware there were servants near him. Always. Always witnesses. Atevi didn't have a single word for lonely. Just — without man 'chi.
He laid the handset in the cradle and stood there holding the aching arm against him; stood, with nowhere to go, now that he'd put paid to the account. He was hurt. He was disappointed in Barb. He'd thought Barb had things better put together. He'd thought — he didn't know. He'd thought maybe he was the one who lacked — whatever it took to form relationships. But it was one too many turnabouts, it was one too many richochets from decision to decision — and Barb expecting rescue. Barb expecting praise for living, which in his book, people just — somehow — did.
Maybe that was what he'd been for Barb. The fantasy life. The rescue from mundanity. When the real world piled up — when it rang phones and intruded on her in her life — she'd fled to Paul. When it kept after her and Paul didn't solve it — now she was mad at Paul and she loved him. Angry people on the street wasn't what Barb wanted to confront. That wasn't the fantasy she had. She just wanted the relationship to look forward to. The pie-in the-sky fix-up… when he got home — — -Always when he got home.
Not a charitable analysis. But from hurt, he was back to damned mad, and two totally disparate things fell into place: Paul and his computers. Him and his absences. It came to him that Barb didn't want engagement, didn't want day-to-day reality in a relationship. She wanted to wait. That was what she did. She'd go on waiting. No matter how he wrenched his gut to try to offend her — he couldn't. They'd fought before, and she'd find a reason to forgive him for the way he'd signed off; she'd stop being mad, she'd wait for him. She'd chatter with her friends at work, them with their on-again, off-again relationships.
She'd top all their crises with hers. She'd fantasize about him coining back. What she had — was always garbage. What she waited for — was always wonderful.
Far from charitable.
Damn right. But he was madder than he'd ever been in their relationship, and it went back to that not-so-chance-timed message she'd blasted him with. He was a man agencies used; transactions he understood, transactions he was used to tracking and evaluating. And he had a sense when the use had gotten outrageous, he recognized crisis-oriented timing, the phone calls timed to get your attention and leave you with no damn choices — every damn phone call she'd made was right when she damn well knew he was finishing his day and trying to get to sleep. He knew pressuring an opponent down to the limit, and a behavior that twined itself around late-evening emotionally fraught messages instead of level-headed waking-hour phone calls for an ex-lover assumed a pattern that really, really set off alarms in his gut; a pattern that argued that his subconscious had been better informed on die feelings he'd been getting than his waking brain had been for the last several years.
Tabini shoved you to the wall. The Department would.
The Department had. But you didn't have them in your bed, you didn't have them telling you they loved you: atevi didn't have the word, the Department had it flagged under restricted usage, and Barb just used it for what she currently wanted.
God, he'd learned at least some few things in semantics.
And while his mind was still in human-mode, and while he had his head momentarily clear of his own brand of wishful thinking, he picked up the handset again to deal with the other unpleasant and inevitable phone call on his own schedule, before he had to write that damned letter to Ilisidi.
"Nadi," he said to the Bu-javid operator, "ring Hanks-paidhi: this is Bren Cameron."
"Yes, nand' paidhi."
He took a breath while the phone was ringing, leaned his shoulders against the wall to ease his legs and rest a slightly aching head, waited. Hoped Hanks wasn't in a mood. And swore that if she was, and if she crossed him, she was going to run into a meat grinder. He wanted a fight on equal terms, near at hand, nothing long-distance. He wanted, dammit, a human conversation, on whatever terms. Hanks at least fought fair and Hanks wasn't a long-distance call.
Obsessive behaviors. Late-evening phone calls. Barb upset his sleep.
Four rings.
"This is Deana Hanks."
In atevi. In polite atevi.
"Good evening, Ms. Hanks. How's the report coming?"
"I'm working on it. Fast as I can. — On my own, Cameron. Using your information."
He dropped into Mosphei'. "A little news I thought you'd like to know. I ran out to a local observatory, talked with the astronomers there on the theory we don't have the full range of concept words we need. I got a report back. I don't know what the whole gist of it is, but I did submit the faster-than-light business to them as a paradox — and there's a gentleman who's been working on something about human origins that at least has the astronomers and the mathematicians talking. I don't know if it has the merit of solving anything — I've a lot of nervousness about it. But it's atevi. And it seems to be on the right track."
A silence. "I thought that was what you didn't want."
"It's there. Slip or not, what you said, you can't stop it being there, not now. The atevi gentleman seems to have struggled up to a notion of a spacetime environment — a glimmer of an answer maybe waiting for the right question. It's the old speculation: atevi theory finally pulling ahead of the engineering."
Another long silence. "On FTL?"
"Other sciences, all playing catch-up to what we keep throwing at them — that's filled their time. But astronomers haven't had our input on any scale to occupy their whole attention. Their work's all been vindication of what they missed, and why they missed it. We've been their focus: where we came from. Why they didn't know. No showy engineering. Just wondering if they could trust their measurements. Asking how to know the real distances."
"That's pretty incredible, Cameron."
"And going from there to the hard questions. How old is the universe? How did a ship get here? Is there substance out there? Is there really an ether?"
"You're setting me up. Right?"
"No setup. I just thought you'd like to know what's going on." The adrenaline had run out. He let himself relax against the wall, let a breath go, actually relieved to have a sane, self-protective reaction on the other end of the line. "We can have our differences, but let's be professionals: nothing to the atevi's detriment. We both make mistakes, that's all. We're bound to. We haven't got a damn lot of Departmental help here. We could blow something up. Major. Let's please try not to."
"What's this about, Cameron? What do you really want?"
"The sound of your voice. It's been a day. The ship's still dealing with the atevi and Mospheira, so you know. We still haven't got a landing site — I'm still waiting for a call."
"My sources say a lander is the vehicle. An old lander the station didn't use."
"Your sources are right."
"Graham and Mercheson?"
"Right again. Where do you get your information?"
"Exactly where and when your people let me have it, I'm damn sure."
"Not my orders."
"The hell."
"If I could depend on you taking orders, certain atevi could get some sleep, now, couldn't they? So could we both. I'd like to, Deana. We've got one job to do, keeping the peace. Neither of us wants it broken. We don't see eye to eye, but at least we agree on what we don't want."
"So what's the news in the great outside?"
"Committee meetings. More committee meetings. Briefings. The mathematicians are holding court." He'd slipped out of Mosphei' and into atevi without thinking, the moment he hit the schedule. "How is the report coming, seriously? Have you got everything you need?"
"I have some detailed questions."
"Anything I can answer?"
"I need transport figures. What's the month by month availability on tanker-cars and flatcars, age, type, tonnage, that kind of thing, on the northern lines?"
"God, I can get it. I could tell you, roughly."
"Garbage in, garbage out. But it's a plug-in figure if you want me to play with it and give you far-instances."
He weighed the next offer very carefully. But all the Transport members but Kabisu were solidly Tabini's: that committee was an area of minimal potential damage. "I could set you up with some committee time, if you'd like to have a meeting. I'd do setup with aides first, let them know what you're going to want.
"So what's the catch, chief?"
"None. I see no problem. Fix your vocabulary list in advance. Don't embarrass us."
"Cameron —"
"— Or be an ass."
"I didn't say anything."
Definite improvement in the temperature level. "I'll set it up."
"When?"
"I'll see the minister tomorrow, at least I hope to, barring other glitches. A lot of these committees are running on limited sleep these days. But Commerce, Trade, Transport, any and all of them — they're pretty well staffed, and it's an important piece of work. Just no damn politicking, Deana."
"Don't tell me —"
"— Deana. — All right?"
"All right."
He let go a clenched-up breath. "I want to tell you —"
"Yes?"
"Deana, I appreciate the cooperation. You had a damn hard landing on the job, I'm realizing that. I just wanted to tell you —"
"Let's not drown in sentiment, here."
"No danger of that. Can we just —"
"I know — God! — oh, God! — Baighi? Baighi?"
"Deana?"
Something popped, dim and dull. Baighi was security. He heard the phone fall, he heard Deana's voice, muffled — he had the presence of mind to push Record — and to leave the phone open as he ran out into the hall. "Algini!" he yelled, and ran as far as the center hall, with servants staring in shock.
"Nand' paidhi!" Algini met him halfway to the foyer, gun in hand, servants gathering all around. "What's happened?"
"Hanks-paidhi's in trouble. Something's happened. Get security down there. I think it was gunfire. I was on the phone with her. Hurry!"
Algini didn't ask — Algini ran back for the security station and he turned back from the dining room through a gathering of anxious, frightened servants.
"Just stay inside," he said to them. "Doors locked. Where's Banichi and Jago?"
There was a babble of answers, wide, frightened eyes. No one seemed to know. Tano was out on business. Algini was by himself. Saidin arrived, late and anxious. "Nadi," he said to her as calmly as he could, "an armed attack on Hanks-paidhi. Call the aiji. Warn him. Check all the doors to the hall." He wanted to go back to the phone again and hear what he could — but there was no assurance where the attack was aimed or where it might aim; he ducked into his bedroom, flung open dresser drawers, one after another, desperately searching beneath stacks of clothes for the gun Banichi had told him was there.
Sixth drawer on the left. He pulled it out from under sweaters, checked the clip as Tabini had shown him, his hands starting to shake as he shoved the clip back in. He stood up, tucked it in his coat under the bad arm, and exited his bedroom, headed down the hall to the private rooms, where he'd left the phone open to Hanks' apartment.
Security the aiji could relax at will. Jago had said that. He remembered it as he reached the office and picked up the phone.
The line sounded dead, now. He couldn't tell. He stayed on a moment, thinking of the arrest order he'd courted — looked toward the half-darkened hall. Light stopped where he was, at the office. The rest, toward the lady's personal apartment, was dark.
He laid down the phone, left the recorder going. The apartment around him resounded faintly to doors opened and closed, servants hurrying presumably wherever they had to perform security checks. He went back out into the hall, light to his left, darkness to his right — covering darkness, darkness that didn't cast a shadow. He longed to take a fast look from the balcony down toward the garden courts where Hanks' apartment was to see whether it was a single attack or anything wider going on — wider, meaning an action against the established order. Or failing that — to ask Algini if he'd found out anything. But it was a risk even crossing the wide-windowed rooms in the lighted section of the halls to get back to the foyer where Algini was.
The other direction offered, for someone confident of the furniture and knowing his way in the dark, a chance to look out without silhouetting himself against lights, a chance to spy down from the height at least to see if there were lights below, and where, and if the search was tending higher or lower on the hill.
More — it struck him that none of the servants had come this way. The balcony doors to the rear, the ventilation for the breakfast room, were most probably securely locked — one expected that at this hour — but the servants were all checking the public, more trafficked areas of the apartment, he couldn't call the servants back without risking them passing doors or windows that might make them targets, and it suddenly seemed urgent and incumbent on him to be sure of those balconies. That the doors were shut, granted: he didn't feel a breeze — but whether they were locked was altogether another question, granted also the lady's servants might not have been through two recent attacks — or have any weapon more deadly than carving knives.
He walked briskly down the hall — found the breakfast room as he expected, all dark, the white gauze curtains resting still, in moonlight and the general city nightglow. He took his hand with the gun from under his coat and walked directly and with some dispatch along the wall, taking the lack of draft or movement in the curtains as proof that the doors were closed — the room was almost always drafty and airy otherwise.
He moved them aside, assured of his invisibility there. Light showed, reflected among the lower roofs, not lights that belonged there, he was well sure. One such light even while he watched moved along the roof line; someone carrying a light, he thought — he could see it from the side of the room as he followed the wall.
Then he felt a draft — saw the curtains move, then, and realized to his dismay the farther door was open.
He stopped. He didn't know the doors hadn't been open all along. He almost retreated, then thought that was what he'd come for: he had to shut and lock that door.
He went to it, moved to shut it and felt a faint presence on his side of the room — he couldn't see it, he couldn't identify it… he couldn't swear it was there. Panic sweated his palms.
Don't acknowledge you're awake, Banichi had told him. It was like that. He moved slowly away with the gun in hand, asking himself what now, what next — he didn't know it wasn't his imagination, he didn't know it wasn't one of his own — he didn't know what to do.
The glass doors near him burst in gunfire, curtains billowed, glass fell in shards, and the presence he'd felt hurtled out of the dark, knocked him stunned to the floor, scrambled over him. The gun had left his hand. Weight crushed him to the tiles. A second burst of gunfire punched the curtains back, and lights swept the balcony. An atevi body lay breathing hard atop him as shots flew over their heads, raked the walls, showered them with plaster and porcelain until the shots stopped.
Then the ateva got up to a crouch and went out the shattered doors, leaving him a second to scrabble across a dark and fragment-littered floor after the gun — he found it in the dark, but the floor and his head had collided in that fall, his arm ached with a mindful fury and his knees buckled as he tried to get up.
There was no more gunfire, at least. He found himself sitting on the floor of the breakfast room in the dark, finally got wobbly legs under him and edged in what he trusted was a prudent crouch out toward the threshold of the shattered doors, gun in shaking hand.
"Get down!"
Banichi's voice, clearly. Banichi shoved down hard on his shoulder, the night went red, and he sat down, winded and blind for an interval, while Banichi occupied the doorway onto the balcony and kept him out of line of whatever was going on — watching, Bren thought, but having no such luck as a clear target. There were just too many people, too many windows.
But if attack had come here —
"Tabini," he said to Banichi.
"Safe," Banichi said. "Stay down, nadi!"
"Sorry," he breathed. "I was checking the doors."
"One could tell. I came in that way. Stay down."
He was content for the moment, in the flare-up of pain from the shoulder, to sit exactly as he was, in a fetal tuck, with the arm hurting only vaguely.
"Where —" he thought to ask. "Where's Hanks? Is this set up, or — ?"
"Hanks-paidhi is missing from her apartment," Banichi said, "and Baighi is dead."
Then it wasn't something Tabini had done. Baighi was Tabini's. Hanks was in someone else's hands. "I was on the phone with her," he said, still having trouble getting breath. "I heard what might have been a shot, I put the phone on Record —"
"This will have been useful," Banichi said. "Is it still running?"
"Unless someone's stopped it. The lady's office. I laid the receiver down."
"I'll see to it," Banichi said. "Are you all right, Bren-ji?"
"I'm fine. Who was that out there? Who's done this?"
"I'm not certain. I don't think I hit anyone."
"Ilisidi —" he said. He hadn't thought, until then, of Ilisidi's apartment below his — of the possibility of Ilisidi's danger — or — he suddenly realized — Ilisidi's involvement.
But that was too crazed. An attack like this, lacking all finesse — Cenedi wasn't like that. Cenedi didn't need to blow walls down.
The Atigeini themselves were a possibility. Damiri's outraged relatives might count doors cheap if they could get a human presence out of their ancestral residence, and get their name clear with the conservatives with whom they had more than slight ties —
Two — very good — very alarming — possibilities. And he could hope it was the Atigeini — he could earnestly hope it was the Atigeini — or even the Guisi. The man who'd fired on him in the legislature, the man Jago had killed — his relatives might have planned a retaliation, except —
"The matter against me," he said to Banichi, "didn't pass the Guild. Did it? Or is there another? These — reckless as they are — -don't feel like amateurs, Banichi."
"No," Banichi said, to which associated question was uncertain. But it covered the matter. And left him with a chill despite the sultry evening.
"Where's Jago? Is she all right?"
"Roof," Banichi said shortly.
Jago was in condition for that kind of gymnastics. Banichi, with his currently game leg, wasn't. And Banichi wasn't pleased, he picked that up. Jago was the junior in the partnership, Jago wasn't the one Banichi would ordinarily have in that position.
But there was in not too long a time a shadow against the curtains, and an exchange of some kind with a hand signal — Banichi waved to someone he could see from where he sat — and the affair dragged on in nervous silence, maneuvering or scouting going on, but he didn't want to chatter like a fool into Banichi's ear while Banichi needed his attention for business. What it meant was a power struggle going on in the Bu-javid, a quiet, discreet shifting of position among lords' protective security; a matter of fencing, he guessed, arms clenched on a nervous stomach, as various lords tried to figure out exactly who'd moved, where they'd moved, why they'd moved, and what side they were on^or who was winning in-this unannounced shadow-war.
Ludicrous, on one level. Grimly humorous. And not. Atevi historically didn't engage in vast conflicts, when little ones would do. But important people and ordinary ones could end up quite effectively dead.
Eventually a faint voice spoke from the pocket-corn, and whatever the verbal code said, Banichi judged it safe to stand up — hand holding the edge of the door, which Banichi ordinarily didn't need, so the leg was bothering him, considerably; Banichi had taken a heavy jolt himself, in that tackle, and Banichi wasn't in a happy mood.
"Get back," Banichi said to him, no politeness about it, and Bren got up cautiously and moved through the dark room in the direction Banichi pointed him, steps breaking already broken glass where the panes had come in, a shot from outside, Bren judged. There was nothing but empty air out in front of that balcony, until one got a very distant vantage from the ell of the distant roof of the legislative halls: the lower roofs weren't at any useful angle for someone trying to get a shot into the apartment.
The legislative roofs. A very good shot with a very good sight.
Or someone rappeling down from the roof above. Where Jago was. He was worried about her safety up there in what was a very high-above-the-courtyards world of what didn't look like safe tiles. But he had no desire to harass Banichi away from necessary concerns, and he was sure Jago was one of the most urgent.
Banichi shepherded him out into the corridor, out into a darkness farther-reaching than it had been when he'd gone down into the area — more lights were off, and Banichi took him as far as Damiri's dark office before he turned on a very dim penlight, picked up the recording cassette from the phone, and pocketed it.
"This," Banichi said, "was well thought. This gives us a chance."
Praise could turn a man's head — and distract him from the other information Banichi gave him by that: that the attack on Hanks might have caught Tabini and the Bu-javid staff totally by surprise.
Which left a broad range of the offended and the ambitious for suspects, if Hanks was the principle target.
But it didn't explain what they'd meant by attacking the third floor, which they couldn't remotely reach except from the roof.
And then carry off a human, granted he was the size of an atevi nine-year-old, over the roofs, with Tabini's guard in pursuit?
Maybe carrying him off really hadn't been the objective.
Maybe dead would have satisfied them quite well.
That thought didn't settle his stomach.
He stayed close to Banichi on the way through the equally darkened sitting room and into the brightly lighted center of the apartment where the servants had gathered in an agitated cluster in the protected, window-less area. There Banichi was all business, giving orders to the servants, answering nothing extraneous — he ordered all passages the servants used shut and locked, ordered no one to move in those passages on any excuse until further notice, and the servants listened in solemn attention.
"Damiri," Saidin said, arriving from the foyer, "says no attack came against them. Are you all right, nand' paidhi?"
"I'm fine. I fear the breakfast room isn't."
"Stay here!" Banichi said, and more quietly, "nand' Saidin."
An attack specifically on the paidhiin. An attack — perhaps on the institution, not the personalities: the institution that made negotiation possible between human and atevi. He found himself increasingly shaken, even protected in the flurry of atevi security precautions and communications between various entities that watched over him. Banichi said they should move to the foyer where they could find Algini, and they went that far, with madam Saidin trailing them.
"Nand' paidhi," Algini began — disheveled clothing seemed to tell the tale, and "I'm quite all right," Bren said, then realized he had sparkles of shattered glass on his trousers and coat and couldn't decide where to dust himself off that people wouldn't track it every which way. Meanwhile Banichi went to the desk inside the foyer security office and called Bu-javid headquarters, at least that was what it sounded like: he heard Banichi report the existence of the tape.
Then Banichi put the tape to play at high volume on their own security office phone system, looking for sounds, names, God knew what. Bren drifted in behind Algini, lost behind a solid wall of tall atevi bent over the machine, and heard only bumps and thumps, a sound that could have been Deana's voice, or furniture being moved. Then a closing door.
Then what sounded like muffled gunfire, he wasn't sure. He hoped not. Banichi began to replay the tape, louder.
Tano wasn't available. Jago was somewhere up on the many-angled roofs. Banichi could look for information, and Saidin could give orders to the servants, but the paidhi had no job and no distraction in the crisis: he finally went out to the foyer, cradling an aching arm, worrying helplessly about Tano and Jago and, disturbed, he was forced to admit it, at the memory of Deana's alarm. Banichi and Algini had made another phone call, in the security station, and straying near the door, he overheard with a sinking heart that not one but two of Tabini's agents were dead.
Killed by someone with skill enough to go against the level of Guild members Tabini employed; and not just one, but two of them. No contract was out, Banichi had said so. It surely wasn't amateurs, this time. It wasn't legal, either. That meant Guild-level assassins on private business — which happened, he knew that; but it didn't make the Guild happy.
And whatever Banichi had found, rapid-scanning the audio tape, whatever information Algini was still searching for in his continued phone-calling, Banichi started up a converse now with various posts via the pocket-corn and paced the foyer and the security station alike with a predatory glower, wanting to be more directly involved, and clearly frustrated in what other searchers had found or hadn't found.
"Nadi," Banichi said at one point, into the com, "don't tell me. Do it!"
Someone had just caught the edge of Banichi's exasperation; and the paidhi judged it a good time to stand very quietly against the wall of the foyer and not be in Banichi's way or Algini's, the both of them hampered by injuries and in no pleasant reception of what they were hearing from elsewhere in the Bu-javid.
"There's no sign of Hanks-paidhi," Banichi finally said with a sharp glance in his direction. "This is difficult to achieve in the quarantine of the lower courts."
"Someone who knows the area?" Bren asked. "Inside? Servants' passages?"
"Few such passages, none to that area. Knowledge of the area, yes, and, one suspects, the silence of the victim."
"Dead?"
"Why remove a body?"
"She doesn't weigh much. They could tuck her up in a box, a serving carrier —"
"A possibility. One we're investigating. But so far no one noticed. And that —"
Came a signal at the door of someone wanting entry, and Algini, who had just that instant been on the pocket-corn, ordered the door opened, which said, apparently reliably enough for Banichi, that he knew who was there.
Naidiri was wanting entry, Tabini's security — with Tabini himself, and Damiri and an accompanying crowd of uniformed security personnel and Bu-javid police.
"Bren-ji," Tabini said, as the visitation flooded into the foyer.
Saidin was quick to welcome Damiri-daja — Tabini was quick to disperse his staff and the police to various points of the foyer, the security office, the apartment and the servant corridors.
Meanwhile Tabini laid a hand on Bren's shoulder, fortunately not the one that ached like very hell.
"You're safe, nadi? One hears there was a window shot through."
"Doors, aiji-ma." He didn't know why now, in all that had gone on, he should suddenly have the wobbles back in his knees or the flutter back in his stomach. He still had the gun in his pocket, and wished, with Tabini's security suddenly everywhere around him, that he had put it back where he'd gotten it, in his bedroom drawer. Tabini knew he had it — or on principle, Tabini knew — but his security might not; and even Tabini might not explain it to the hasdrawad. "I fear there's serious damage to the premises. The breakfast room. I don't know how bad. I'm very sorry. I haven't seen it with the lights on."
"One can hardly hold you responsible," Tabini said.
Not responsible and not entirely useful in the investigation. Did you see anything and did you hear anything? were the obvious questions from Naidiri, and, No, was his lame answer, Nothing except a few words before what's on the tape from the telephone, which Banichi was able with some satisfaction to produce; and graciously attributed its existence to the paidhi's quick Slinking.
He quoted Deana's outcry, gave his interpretation of it — and his memory of where Deana would have been standing in that apartment if the furniture was where he'd last seen it.
Then ensued another attempt to hear the background noise — atevi hearing being quite acute, they seemed to pick up something of significance or interest, but they were unclear what. He heard nothing at all, and there wasn't agreement, except to turn the tape over immediately by junior officer courier for Bu-javid security technicians to refine.
Meanwhile the paidhi found it prudent to stay out of the argument of trained security personnel and out of the general traffic: he leaned against the wall, amongst the flowers that had come in earlier that evening, wishing to get out of his glass-impregnated clothing, wishing for a chair, and acutely wishing Banichi had been a little more gentle in falling on him, though he by no means preferred the alternative. He was still trying to think how he could manufacture an excuse to return to his room to rid himself of the incriminating gun, in itself a fracture of Treaty law, a cause of considerable diplomatic flap if even some well-meaning someone happened to notice the weight in his pocket.
And what could he plead then? Tabini gave it to me, when Tabini's position and relation to humans was already being questioned by atevi conservatives by this very attack?
Someone else would have to take the blame, and that someone would clearly be Banichi, whose gun it actually was, thanks to a trade they'd made before Malguri, and who was loyal enough to Tabini to take whatever consequences the law or the hasdrawad or Tabini's enemies demanded. If he asked to go back to his room even to change clothes he foresaw some security person going with him for fear of assassins lurking in the shadows, and if not that, at least a handful of servants and maybe Saidin, which had the same result, so it seemed the better part of discretion to stay where he was, to look occasionally interested to excuse his presence underfoot, and to try to remain otherwise as invisible as possible, with the telltale pocket turned to the nearest large vase.
Tabini and Banichi and his senior security began to talk about probable motives: that was worth the listening. He strained through the occasional noise from other debates and questionings of the servants to gather where various potential suspects in the Bu-javid had been associating and where certain loyalties were reckoned to lie; who might be exonerated, absolutely, and who might have been tacitly or financially in on the proposal against the paidhi in the Guild, the motion that had failed the vote — a matter in which Banichi and Naidiri knew the specific names and even Tabini, evidently, did not, nor inquire — but there were generalities passed that involved the obvious names, the heads of the conservative clans, not, one noted, studying the floor tiles, the Atigeini, but it wasn't a name to raise with Damiri in the vicinity.
Then notification via pocket-corn came in to Tabini and his security chief about the progress of the search through the lower court, where Hanks had disappeared — nothing encouraging so far, and the paidhi, feeling wobblier and wobblier, could, finally, only ask himself whether they were right in suspecting something against the established order and whether it was not instead the paidhiin's doings, placing the atevi universe-concept under attack.
Grigiji's mathematics.
His visit to the observatory.
Ilisidi hadn't read the paper and then gotten angry: Ilisidi had grown colder and colder, once that paper landed on her table and its implications landed in the delicate equation of atevi politics.
Which might mean — another perusal of the floor tiles, which had brown squares and brass inclusions in a floral pattern — the paidhi had stuck his good intentions into atevi affairs and atevi debates Ilisidi was already familiar with, come back with a theory that wasn't as new as he thought, or that was somehow controversial in ways a human didn't easily twig to.
Certainly possible when the math came far too esoteric for the paidhi to unravel, when the search after ultimate rationality that atevi had made over thousands of years was bearing atevi results and things proposed to them were going to break down very, very basic beliefs such as — God knew — might set off psychological, political, sociological earthquakes.
The paidhi could only ask himself in that light how much else could come undone today, and how much of it he might have caused, and what subtleties he should have long since guessed. All well-meaning, he'd brought that theory of Grigiji's to the city, he'd let it loose in blind hope that atevi argument might make sense to atevi, and maybe not known enough — as no human was able to know — what other bombshells might lie buried in the document. Hanks had tossed FTL into the dialogue and he'd called her foolish. He'd gone into that meeting to Ilisidi in blind faith in her numerical agnosticism, never once considering that Ilisidi herself might hold some well-concealed articles of faith Grigiji could challenge.
He kept playing and replaying the breakfast meeting in his mind, how strange it had seemed to him then that Ilisidi hadn't looked at the papers, that she hadn't deigned to take them — I
Dammit, he didn't yet understand Ilisidi's reaction, except to conclude that she disapproved what he was doing, or distrusted what he was doing — or disapproved unread what he had brought her. He didn't think Ilisidi herself would flinch from intellectual challenge, but she would take offense if she thought he was being a gullible fool or if his actions indicated he took her for one.
All of which still left Ilisidi among the suspects. He hadn't heard Tabini bring up the name, but he suspected she was on Tabini's short list. And failing Ilisidi — I
"Show me," Damiri said, "show me where these fools attempted, Saidi-ji. I want to see. I'm tired of waiting. We've chased them, we're surely clear by now."
"Nandi," Naidiri began to say.
"I am not going to cower in the foyer, naiin-ji. This is Atigeini territory, this is my house, and my orders, fact; this is my window that was broken, fact; and my security and the paidhi's security has things in hand, fact. — So may we quit discussing theory in my house, please, and have a look at fact before we loose the Guild?"
"May we discuss fact before we rush into the line of fire?" Tabini retorted. "We have too many willing suspects, not all of whom are outside this house."
"I suspect nothing! Look to your own relatives!"
"My relatives? My relatives? Give me an heir, woman, and we'll discuss our relatives. Meanwhile kindly don't walk in front of windows."
"Heir, heir, heir, of course the heir! Any moment, nai-ji, perhaps tonight, nai-ji, and in the meantime —"
"In the meantime, take orders like a lady, nai-ji, and make less of a target, fortunate gods, woman!"
At a certain point one decidedly found the floor tiles preoccupying and, as the paidhi reflected that, while it was an honor to be treated as part of the household, along with security and the servants, he had much rather —
"Fortunate gods, inform me why I chose an Atigeini!"
"Intelligence. Resourcefulness. Our distinguished history. My breakfast room, nai-ji, if you please, with my servants, with your security if you've such doubts of my relatives."
"Gods least favorable, let's see your damn doors," Tabini muttered, and waved a gesture toward the recesses of the apartment. "Naidiri! Have a care to the windows, the lot of you. Damn!"
Forthwith there began an expedition, Saidin in the lead, along with Algini, a crowd of security and police, even certain of the servants, to let Damiri assess the damage to the doors and the breakfast room. The paidhi found nothing quite graceful to do but tag f | along as, at least, a witness to the destruction. He hoped for a chance along the way past his bedroom to duck in and put the gun away; but there was security before and behind, and no lingering invited. Someone at least had closed the inner shutters in the study as they passed, and the servants who lined the way were all very quiet, very subdued and worried, bowing like grass in the storm of Damiri's passage and doubtless staring at their backs after they'd gone.
Lights were on throughout the apartment, now; they passed scattered police, scattered security guards, especially in the area of the breakfast room.
And the damage there proved appallingly worse than Bren had feared: not only shattered glass from the doors, but shattered wall tiles where the shots had raked the walls and splintered antique porcelain reliefs that one only hoped restorers could repair. He felt a physical shock, realizing the small size of the fragments where porcelain had met high-powered bullets — some of it might be the dust on his clothing, and he asked himself if they could possibly recover enough chips of porcelain to reassemble or recreate the bas relief of flowers and vines —
"Gods damn them!" Damiri said.
Saidin — Saidin looked absolutely devastated.
"Damiri-daja," Bren felt it incumbent on him to say, perhaps foolishly, seeing the thunderous frown on Damiri's face. "Nand' Saidin — I am inexpressibly sorry. I wish — I wish — if I was the target — I'd stood somewhere far less delicate."
Damiri whirled on him so suddenly he feared she meant to hit him. But all the violence in her scowl and the lock of her arms, one in the other, scarcely reached her voice. "Nand' paidhi," she said, "this affront to my house will have an answer. This attack on my guest and my staff will have a severe answer. This willful destruction will have blood. There are those who will carry that answer with or without the Guild, with or without other Atigeini approval."
"'Miri-ji," Tabini said reprovingly.
"Don't caution me! This is intolerable! Our human guest can express his shock — so wherein can civilized atevi accept such goings-on? I do not, I do not, aiji-ma! Fire at random into the premises? Shoot the servants wholesale along with the target? Naidiri, Sagimi, is this Guild work or is it not?"
"It is not," a man said, and Naidiri echoed, "Not possibly."
Certainly not Cenedi, Bren thought, then, finally finding a landing place for the doubt that had been buzzing around his brain. Not Cenedi. Not any of the men who worked for Ilisidi. He wanted desperately to believe that that was the truth, and on that thought, he wanted to know for certain that Ilisidi was safe.
Not to mention Jago and Tano and his own household.
He listened to the arrangements for restorationists to come in to assess the damage, without, Damiri said, disturbance to the paidhi.
"I will not," Damiri declared, still hot, "let this insult happen and not retaliate. They have me to deal with, if they trust in your forbearance, nai-ji. They hope to provoke my uncle. They hope to send a signal. Well, they've certainly sent one." She bent and picked up a shattered flower, a three-petaled lily. "Look, look at this destruction. I want my uncle to see this, aiji-ma. I want the whole world to see it, I want it sent out to the news services, along with the advisement the paidhi is quite well and undisturbed by this foolishness. He can sleep in my own bedroom and have breakfast with my staff and with me in this breakfast room. I tell you I will not be intimidated."
"No, no, no, 'Miri-ji," Tabini said softly. "I'd rather far less publicity until we find them and eliminate this problem. Then use the television, yes, and all the pictures. On the other hand — if you wish to send the image of this handiwork to your uncle —"
Damiri cast Tabini a silent, sidelong look.
"Send him a piece of the porcelain," Tabini said. "The lily… would do quite well. One believes possibly someone exceeded orders. On the other hand, perhaps they wished to signal their contempt of Atigeini claims to command by using this as a diversion."
There was a positively fierce enjoyment in Damiri's eyes. "Your plane."
"At your disposal. But I want it back by morning. And it doesn't refuel there. — Bren-ji, you're quite safe, one assures you, in whatever bedroom you choose tonight. Don't let 'Miri-daja bully you. It's a damn stiff mattress."
One could well blush. "Tabini-ma." The ache in the shoulder made his teeth hurt, he had never yet found the chance to be rid of the gun, and he tried consistently to keep that side and that pocket away from atevi eyes. Especially those of the Bu-javid police. "I only, earnestly, regret that I attracted such difficulty to this house, and I'm quite content with my bedroom."
"The paidhi is very gracious," Damiri said, and offered her hand, expecting his: he gave it, perforce, compelled to look up to a straightforwardly curious stare, a very solid handclasp. "Scandal, scandal, scandal. I think it's a very nice, a very honest face, myself, and my aunt can swallow her salacious and doubtless entirely envious suspicions. — You're so exquisitely polite, nand' paidhi."
"I — hope to be, daja-ma."
"I may never get my staff back. They're quite besotted."
"I — hope I've done nothing improper, daja-ma."
"Bren-paidhi. They dream nightly of you doing something improper. I've heard the reports."
"Daja-ma —"
Tabini rescued his arm and his hand and walked him a little distance away. "Atigeini internal politics be damned, the lily porcelains are not the question, Hanks-paidhi is. The attack on your residence might have been quite serious, but I doubt they expected to succeed: it was likely intended as a diversion from the real objective, and my prospective wife's relatives will not take this lightly, not the attack, certainly not the collateral damage, least of all the slight of such damage being a mere diversion, no matter how they've regarded your tenancy here on other principles. Have you any personal suspects in the kidnaping of Hanks-paidhi, Bren-ji?"
"I — no, aiji-ma, discounting that it was anyone of the Guild, no, all my suspects vanish. Except — someone who wanted revenge. Or someone who —" the thought nudged its way to the center of his apprehensions "— who wanted both: her in their hands and me dead — leaving no paidhi between you and Mospheira at this juncture. For whatever reason."
"If they could achieve that. Which they surely don't expect."
"I would not say," Damiri interjected, having overtaken them, "that this attempt evidences great intellect. Desperation. But not great intellect."
"Or carelessness of Atigeini disposition."
"Stupidity," Damiri said. "Aiji-ma."
"The fact that one doesn't care what your uncle thinks is not necessarily evidence of stupidity. — Daja-ji."
"The fact I regard the lilies as my holding and the artist however dead as in my man'chi should have them sleep
less at night. If my uncle demurs, I demand satisfaction!"
"One will have it, lily-daja, but the paidhi's safety is in my own, and you will not initiate actions that jeopardize Bren or that disagreeable woman whose life I foolishly agreed to protect."
"One has no wish to jeopardize Bren in any way." Damiri laid a hand on Bren's sore shoulder: a very gentle hand, of which he was glad. "Have I ever shown such an inclination?"
What did one do? Flinch from under the aiji's lady's hand? One stood still, aware of the double entendre, and said, solemnly, "By no means, nai-ma."
"Aiji-ma." It was Algini in the doorway, bidding for Tabini's attention, with: "The ship is asking for Bren-paidhi. Forgive the intrusion."
The mind — wasn't ready for one more extraneity, not for Mosphei', Mospheiran politics, or foreign negotiations. The mind was on shattered porcelain, Damiri's not-entirely joking threats, and the intricacies of atevi association: that, and Ilisidi, and the Guisi, and politics 11 and the disappearance of Hanks-paidhi, which, outside its atevi impact, was going to play very badly in certain Mospheiran circles — let alone aboard a ship contemplating sending personnel down to them.
The ship mustn't find out. The associations within the Association had already absorbed all the strain the bonds of man'chi would bear. Tabini could not bear any reneging on the landing, no matter the reason for caution.
"If I could guess," Algini said, as he headed for the doorway, "it's a young man, nadi-ma."
"Jase," he said.
"The landing," Tabini said, tagging him close. "Possibly."
"Very possibly," he said, on his double train of thought, trying to gather up the lost threads of the Jase Graham affair: like why the ship hadn't called the mainland for two days, and what Mospheira had been trying to argue with the ship, latest, in the meantime, and what he had to say as a contingency to the ship trying to back out for reasons that might have nothing whatsoever to do with assassination attempts.
At least one answer to matters held in suspension — or news that another deal was collapsing — was waiting for him on the phone.