Nebula Awards Showcase 2017

by Julie E. Czerneda

  “This is my gun,” Banichi said forcefully. “Can there be any question this is my gun? A noise waked you. I lay in wait for the assassin. I fired. What did you see?”

  “A shadow. A shadow coming in through the curtains.” Another shiver took him. He knew how foolish he had been, firing straight across and through the doors. The bullet might have kept going across the garden, into the kitchens. It could have ricocheted off a wall and hit someone asleep in another apartment. The shock persisted in his hands and in his ears, strong as the smell of gunpowder in the air, that didn’t belong with him, in his room. . . .

  The rain started with a vengeance. Banichi used his pocket-com to talk to the searchers, and to headquarters, lying to them, saying he’d fired the shot, seeing the intruder headed for the paidhi’s room, and, no, the paidhi hadn’t been hurt, only frightened, and the aiji shouldn’t be wakened, if he hadn’t heard the shots. But the guard should be doubled, and the search taken to the south gates, before, Banichi said, the rain wiped out the tracks.

  Banichi signed off.

  “Why did they come here?” Bren asked. Assassins, he understood; but that any ordinary assassin should come into the residential compound, where there were guards throughout, where the aiji slept surrounded by hundreds of willing defenders—nobody in their right mind would do that.

  And to assassinate him, Bren Cameron, with the aiji at the height of all power and with the nai’aijiin all confirmed in their houses and supportive—where was the sense in it? Where was the gain to anyone at all sane?

  “Nadi Bren.” Banichi stood over him with his huge arms folded, looking down at him as if he were dealing with some feckless child. “What did you see?”

  “I told you. Just a shadow, coming through the curtain.” The emphasis of the question scared him. He might have been dreaming. He might have roused the whole household and alarmed the guards all for a nightmare. In the way of things at the edge of sleep, he no longer knew for sure what he had seen.

  But there had been blood. Jago said so. He had shot someone.

  “I discharged the gun,” Banichi said. “Get up and wash your hands, nadi. Wash them twice and three times. And keep the garden doors locked.”

  “They’re only glass,” he protested. He had felt safe until now. The aiji had given him the gun two weeks ago. The aiji had taught him to use it, the aiji’s doing alone, in the country-house at Taiben, and no one could have known about it, not even Banichi, least of all, surely, the assassin—if he had not dreamed the intrusion through the curtains, if he had not just shot some innocent neighbor, out for air on a stifling night.

  “Nadi,” Banichi said, “go wash your hands.”

  He couldn’t move, couldn’t deal with mundane things, or comprehend what had happened—or why, for the gods’ sake, why the aiji had given him such an unprecedented and disturbing present, except a general foreboding, and the guards taking stricter account of passes and rules . . .

  Except Tabini-aiji had said—‘Keep it close.’ And he had been afraid of his servants finding it in his room.

  “Nadi.”

  Banichi was angry with him. He got up, naked and shaky as he was, and went across the carpet to the bath, with a queasier and queasier stomach.

  The last steps were a desperate, calculated rush for the toilet, scarcely in time to lose everything in his stomach, humiliating himself, but there was nothing he could do—it was three painful spasms before he could get a breath and flush the toilet.

  He was ashamed, disgusted with himself. He ran water in the sink and washed and scrubbed and washed, until he no longer smelled the gunpowder on his hands, only the pungency of the soap and astringents. He thought Banichi must have left, or maybe called the night-servants to clean the bath.

  But as he straightened and reached for the towel, he found Banichi’s reflection in the mirror.

  “Nadi Bren,” Banichi said solemnly. “We failed you tonight.”

  That stung, it truly stung, coming from Banichi, who would never humiliate himself as he had just done. He dried his face and rubbed his dripping hair, then had to look at Banichi face on, Banichi’s black, yellow-eyed visage as impassive and powerful as a graven god’s.

  “You were brave,” Banichi said, again, and Bren Cameron, the descendant of spacefarers, the representative of six generations forcibly earthbound on the world of the atevi, felt it like a slap of Banichi’s massive hand.

  “I didn’t get him. Somebody’s loose out there, with a gun or—”

  “We didn’t get him, nadi. It’s not your business, to ‘get him.’ Have you been approached by anyone unusual? Have you seen anything out of order before tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you get the gun, nadi-ji?”

  Did Banichi think he was lying? “Tabini gave it . . .”

  “From what place did you get the gun? Was this person moving very slowly?”

  He saw what Banichi was asking. He wrapped the towel about his shoulders, cold, with the storm wind blowing into the room. He heard the boom of thunder above the city. “From under the mattress. Tabini said keep it close. And I don’t know how fast he was moving, the assassin, I mean. I just saw the shadow and slid off the bed and grabbed the gun.”

  Banichi’s brow lifted ever so slightly. “Too much television,” Banichi said with a straight face, and took him by the shoulder. “Go back to bed, nadi.”

  “Banichi, what’s happening? Why did Tabini give me a gun? Why did he tell me—?”

  The grip tightened. “Go to bed, nadi. No one will disturb you after this. You saw a shadow. You called me. I fired two shots.”

  “I could have hit the kitchen!”

  “Most probably one shot did. Kindly remember bullets travel, nadi-ji. Was it not you who taught us? Here.”

  To his stunned surprise, Banichi drew his own gun from the holster and handed it to him.

  “Put that under your mattress,” Banichi said, and left him—walked on out of the bedroom and into the hall, pulling the door to behind him.

  He heard the lock click as he stood there stark naked, with Banichi’s gun in his hand and wet hair trailing about his shoulders and dripping on the floor.

  He went and shoved the gun under the mattress where he had hidden the other one, and, hoping Jago would choose another way in, shut the lattice doors and the glass, stopping the cold wind and the spatter of rain onto the curtains and the carpet.

  Thunder rumbled. He was chilled through. He made a desultory attempt to straighten the bedclothes, then dragged a heavy robe out of the armoire to wrap about himself before he turned off the room lights and struggled, wrapped in the bulky robe, under the tangled sheets. He drew himself into a ball, spasmed with shivers.

  Why me? he asked himself over and over, and asked himself whether he could conceivably have posed so extreme a problem to anyone that that individual would risk his life to be rid of him. He couldn’t believe he had put himself in a position like that and never once caught a clue of such a complete professional failure.

  Perhaps the assassin had thought him the most defenseless dweller in the garden apartments, and his open door had seemed the most convenient way to some other person, perhaps to the inner hallways and Tabini-aiji himself.

  But there were so many guards. That was an insane plan, and assassins were, if hired, not mad and not prone to take such risks.

  An assassin might simply have mistaken the room. Someone of importance might be lodged in the guest quarters in the upper terrace of the garden. He hadn’t heard that that was the case, but otherwise the garden court held just the guards, and the secretaries and the chief cook and the master of accounts—and himself—none of whom were controversial in the least.

  But Banichi had left him his gun in place of the aiji’s, which he had fired. He understood, clearer-witted now, why Banichi had taken it with him, and why Banichi had had him wash his hands, in case the chief of general security might not believe the account Banichi would give, and in ca
se the chief of security wanted to question the paidhi and have him through police lab procedures.

  He most sincerely hoped to be spared that. And the chief of security had no cause against him that he knew of—had no motive to investigate him, when he was the victim of the crime, and had no reason that he knew of to challenge Banichi’s account, Banichi being in some ways higher than the chief of security himself.

  But then . . . who would want to break into his room? His reasoning looped constantly back to that, and to the chilling fact that Banichi had left him another gun. That was dangerous to do. Someone could decide to question him. Someone could search his room and find the gun, which they could surely then trace to Banichi, with all manner of public uproar. Was it prudent for Banichi to have done that? Was Banichi somehow sacrificing himself, in a way he didn’t want, and for something he might have caused?

  It even occurred to him to question Banichi’s integrity—but Banichi and his younger partner Jago were his favorites among Tabini’s personal guards, the ones that took special care of him, while they stood every day next to Tabini, capable of any mischief, if they intended any, to Tabini himself—let alone to a far more replaceable human.

  Gods, no, suspecting them was stupid. Banichi wouldn’t see him harmed. Banichi would directly lie for him. So would Jago, for Tabini’s sake—he was the paidhi, the Interpreter, and the aiji needed him, and that was reason enough for either of them. Tabini-aiji would take it very seriously, what had happened, Tabini would immediately start inquiries, make all kinds of disturbance—

  And, dammit, he didn’t want the whole citadel set on its ear over this. He didn’t want notoriety, or to be the center of an atevi feud. Publicity harmed his position among atevi. It completely destroyed his effectiveness the moment politics crept into his personal influence, and politics would creep into the matter—politics would leap into it, the minute it hit the television news. Everybody would have an opinion, everybody would have a theory and it could only be destructive to his work.

  He huddled under chill covers, trying to get his wits about him, but his empty stomach distracted him and the smell of gunpowder made him queasy. If he called for something to settle his nerves, the night-staff would bring him whatever he asked, or rouse his own servants at his request, but poor Moni and Taigi had probably been roused out of bed to bewildering questions—Did you shoot at the paidhi? Did you leave his door unlatched?

  Security was probably going down the list of employees, calling in the whole night-staff and everyone he dealt with—as if anyone in this whole wing could be sleeping now. The shots had probably echoed clear downhill and into the city, the phone lines were probably jammed, the rail station would be under tight restrictions, clear into tomorrow’s morning commuter traffic . . . no flattery to him: he’d seen what resulted when someone set off alarms inside Tabini’s security.

  He wanted hot tea and crackers. But he could only make security’s job more difficult by asking for personal errands to be run up and down through halls they were trying to search.

  Meanwhile the rain spatted against the glass. And it was less and less likely that they would catch the assassin at all.

  Moni and Taigi arrived in the morning with his breakfast cart—and the advisement from staff central that Tabini-aiji wanted him in early audience.

  Small surprise, that was. In anticipation of a call, he had showered and shaved and dressed himself unaided before dawn, as far as his accustomed soft trousers and shirt, at least, and braided his hair back himself. He had had the television on before they arrived, listening to the morning news: he feared the case might be notorious by now, but to his perplexity he heard not so much as a passing mention of any incident, only a report on the storm last night, which had generated hail in Shigi township, and damaged roof tiles in Wingin before it had gone roaring over the open plains.

  He was strangely disappointed, even insulted, by the silence. One had assassins invading one’s room and, on one level, despite his earnest desire for obscurity to the outside world, he did hope to hear confirmed that there had been an intruder in the aiji’s estates, the filtered sort of news they might have released—or, better yet, that the intruder was securely in the aiji’s hands, undergoing questioning.

  Nothing of the sort—at least by the television news; and Moni and Taigi laid out breakfast with not a question nor a comment about what had happened in the garden court last night, or why there were towels all over the bathroom floor. They simply delivered the message they had had from the staff central office, absorbed every disarrangement of the premises without seeming to notice, and offered not a hint of anything wrong, or any taste of rumors that might be running the halls.

  The lord second heir of Talidi province had assassinated a remote relative in the water garden last spring in an argument over an antique firearm, and the halls of the complex had buzzed with it for days.

  Not this morning. Good morning, nand’ paidhi, how are you feeling, nand’ paidhi? More berries? Tea?

  Then, finally, with a downcast glance, from Moni, who seldom had much to say, “We’re very glad you’re all right, nand’ paidhi.”

  He swallowed his bite of fruit. Gratified.

  Appeased. “Did you hear the commotion last night?”

  “The guard waked us,” Taigi said. “That was the first we knew of anything wrong.”

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “No, nand’ paidhi.”

  With the lightning and the thunder and the rain coming down, he supposed that the sharp report of the gunshot could have echoed strangely, with the wind swirling about the hill, and with the gun being set off inside the room, rather than outside. The figure in the doorway last night had completely assumed the character of dream to him, a nightmare occurrence in which details both changed and diminished. His servants’ utter silence surrounding the incident had unnerved him, even cast his memory into doubt . . . not to mention his understanding and expectation of atevi closest to him.

  He was glad to hear a reasonable explanation. So the echo of it hadn’t carried to the lower-floor servants’ court, down on the side of the hill and next the ancient walls. Probably the thunder had covered the echoes. Perhaps there’d been a great peal of it as the storm onset and as the assassin made his try—he’d had his own ears full of the gunshot, which to him had sounded like doom, but it didn’t mean the rest of the world had been that close.

  But Moni and Taigi were at least duly concerned, and, perhaps perplexed by his human behaviors, or their expectation of them, they didn’t know quite what else to say, he supposed. It was different, trying to pick up gossip when one was in the center of the trouble. All information, especially in a life-and-death crisis, became significant; appearing to know something meant someone official could come asking, and no one close to him reasonably wanted to let rumors loose—as he, personally, didn’t want any speculation going on about him from servants who might be expected to have information.

  No more would Moni and Taigi want to hear another knock on their doors, and endure a second round of questions in the night. Classically speaking—treachery and servants were a cliche in atevi dramas. It was too ridiculous—but it didn’t mean they wouldn’t feel the onus of suspicion, or feel the fear he very well understood, of unspecified accusations they had no witnesses to refute.

  “I do hope it’s the end of it,” he said to them. “I’m very sorry, nadiin. I trust there won’t be more police. I know you’re honest.”

  “We greatly appreciate your confidence,” Moni said, and both of them bowed. “Please be careful.”

  “Banichi and Jago are on the case.”

  “That’s very good,” Taigi said, and set scrambled eggs in front of him.

  So he had his breakfast and put on his best summer coat, the one with the leather collar and leather down the front edges to the knee.

  “Please don’t delay in the halls,” Taigi said.

  “I assure you,” he said.

  “I
sn’t there security?” Moni asked. “Let us call security.”

  “To walk to the audience hall?” They were worried, he decided, now that the verbal dam had broken. He was further gratified. “I assure you there’s no need. It was probably some complete lunatic, probably hiding in a storage barrel somewhere. They might go after lord Murida in the water garden at high noon—not me. I assure you. With the aiji’s own guards swarming about . . . not highly likely.” He took his key and slipped it into his trousers. “Just be careful of the locks. The garden side, especially, for the next few days.”

  “Nadi,” they said, and bowed again—anxious, he decided, as they’d truly been when they’d arrived, just not advertising their state of mind, which atevi didn’t. Which reminded him that he shouldn’t let his worry reach his face either. He went cheerfully out the door—

  Straight into a black uniform and, well above eye-level, a scowling atevi face.

  “Nand’ paidhi,” the guard officer said. “I’m to escort you to the hall.”

  “Hardly necessary,” he said. His heart had skipped a dozen beats. He didn’t personally know the man. But the uniform wasn’t one an assassin would dare counterfeit, not on his subsequent life, and he walked with the officer, out into the corridors of the complex, past the ordinary residential guard desk and into the main areas of the building—along the crowded colonnade, where wind gusted, fresh with rain and morning chill.

  Ancient stonework took sunlight and shadow, the fortress walls of the Bu-javid, the citadel and governmental complex, sprawled over its high hill, aloof and separate from the urban sprawl of Shejidan—and down below those walls the hotels and the hostelries would be full to overflowing. The triennial public audience, beginning this morning, brought hundreds of provincial lords and city and township and district officials into town—by subway, by train—all of them trekking the last mile on foot from the hotels that ringed the ancient Bu-javid, crowds bearing petitions climbing the terraced stone ceremonial road, passing beneath the fortified Gate of the Promise of Justice, and trekking finally up the last broad, flower-bordered courses to the renowned Ninefold Doors, a steady stream of tall, broad-shouldered atevi, with their night-black skins and glossy black braids, some in rich coats bordered in gilt and satin, some in plain, serviceable cloth, but clearly their courtly best. Professional politicians rubbed shoulder to shoulder with ordinary trade folk, lords of the Associations with anxious, unpracticed petitioners, bringing their colorfully ribboned petitions, rolled and bound, and with them, their small bouquets of flowers to lay on the foyer tables, an old custom of the season.