The hall at the end of the open colonnade smelled of recent rain and flowers, and rang with voices—atevi meeting one another, or falling into line to register with the secretaries, on whose desks, set up in the vast lower foyer, the stacks of documents and petitions were growing.
For the courtiers, a human on his way to court business through this milling chaos was an ordinary sight—a pale, smallish figure head and shoulders shorter than the crowds through which he passed, a presence conservative in his simple, unribboned braid and leather trim—the police escort was uncommon, but no one stared, except the country folk and private petitioners.
“Look!” a child cried, and pointed at him.
A mortified parent batted the offending hand down while the echoes rang, high and clear, in the vaulted ceilings. Atevi looked. And pretended not to have seen either him or his guard.
A lord of the provinces went through the halls attended by his own aides and by his own guards and the aiji’s as well, and provoked no rude stares. Bren went with his police escort, in the same pretense of invisibility, a little anxious, since the child’s shout, but confident in the visible presence of the aiji’s guards at every doorway and every turn, ordinary precaution on audience day.
In that near presence, he bade a courteous farewell to his police escort at the small Whispering Port, which, a small section of one of the great ceremonial doors, led discreetly and without official recognition into the back of the audience hall. He slipped through it and softly closed it again, so as not to disturb the advance meetings in progress.
Late, he feared. Moni and Taigi hadn’t advanced the hour of his wake-up at all, simply shown up at their usual time, lacking other orders and perhaps fearing to do anything unusual, with a police guard standing at his door. He hoped Tabini hadn’t wanted otherwise, and started over to the reception desk to see where he fitted in the hearings.
Banichi was there. Banichi, in the metal-studded black of the aiji’s personal guard, intercepted him with a touch on his arm.
“Nadi Bren. Did you sleep last night?”
“No,” he confessed. And hoping: “Did you catch him?”
“No, nadi. There was the storm. We were not so fortunate.”
“Does Tabini know what happened?” He cast a glance toward the dais, where Tabini-aiji was talking to governor Brominandi, one of the invitational private hearings. “I think I’m on the agenda. Does he want to talk with me? What shall I tell him?”
“The truth, only in private. It was his gun—was it not?”
He threw Banichi a worried look. If Banichi doubted his story, he hadn’t left him with that impression last night. “I told you the truth, Banichi.”
“I’m sure you did,” Banichi said, and when he would have gone on to the reception desk, as he had purposed, to give his name to the secretary, Banichi caught his sleeve and held him back. “Nothing official.” Banichi nodded toward the dais, still holding his sleeve, and brought him to the foot of the dais instead.
Brominandi of Entaillan province was finishing his business. Brominandi, whose black hair was shot through with white, whose hands sparkled with rings both ornamental and official, would lull a stone to boredom, and the bystanding guards had as yet found no gracious way to edge the governor off.
Tabini nodded to what Brominandi was saying, nodded a second time, and finally said, “I’ll take it before council.” It sounded dreadfully like the Alujis river rights business again, two upstream provinces against three downstream which relied on its water for irrigation. For fifty years, that pot had been boiling, with suit and counter-suit. Bren folded his hands in front of him and stood with Banichi, head ducked, making himself as inconspicuous as a human possibly could in the court.
Finally Tabini-aiji accepted the inevitable petition (or was it counter-petition?) from Brominandi, a weighty thing of many seals and ribbons, and passed it to his legislative aides.
At which time Bren slid a glance up to Tabini, and received one back, which was the summons to him and to Banichi, up the several steps to the side of the aiji’s chair, in the lull in which the favored early petitioners could mill about and gossip, a dull, echoing murmur in the vaulted, white and gilt hall.
Tabini said, right off, “Do you know who it was, Bren? Do you have any idea?”
“None, aiji-ma, nothing. I shot at him. I missed. Banichi said I should say he fired the shot.”
A look went past him, to Banichi. Tabini’s yellow eyes were very pale, ghostly in certain lights—frightening, when he was angry. But he didn’t seem to be angry, or assigning blame to either of them.
Banichi said, “It removed questions.”
“No idea the nature of the intrusion.”
“A burglar would be a fool. Assignations . . .”
“No,” Bren said, uncomfortable in the suggestion, but Tabini knew him, knew that atevi women had a certain curiosity about him, and it was a joke at his expense.
“Not a feminine admirer.”
“No, aiji-ma.” He certainly hoped not, recalling the blood Jago had found in the first of the rain, out on the terrace.
Tabini-aiji reached out and touched his arm, apology for the levity. “No one has filed. It’s a serious matter. I take it seriously. Be careful with your locks.”
“The garden door is only glass,” Banichi said. “Alterations would be conspicuous.”
“A wire isn’t,” Tabini said.
Bren was dismayed. The aiji’s doors and windows might have such lethal protections. He had extreme reservations about the matter.
“I’ll see to it,” Banichi said.
“I might walk into it,” Bren said.
“You won’t,” Tabini said. And to Banichi: “See to it. This morning. One on either door. His key to disarm. Change the locks.”
“Aiji,” Bren began to say.
“I have a long list today,” Tabini said, meaning shut up and sit down, and when Tabini-aiji took that tone about a matter, there was no quarrel with it. They left the top of the dais. Bren stopped at the fourth step, which was his ordinary post.
“You stay here,” Banichi said. “I’ll bring you the new key.”
“Banichi, is anybody after me?”
“It would seem so, wouldn’t it? I do doubt it was a lover.”
“Do you know anything I don’t?”
“Many things. Which interests you?”
“My life.”
“Watch the wire. The garden side will activate with a key, too. I’m moving your bed from in front of the door.”
“It’s summer. It’s hot.”
“We all have our inconveniences.”
“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on!”
“You shouldn’t turn down the ladies. Some take it badly.”
“You’re not serious.”
No, Banichi wasn’t. Banichi was evading the question again. Banichi damned well knew something. He stood in frustration as Banichi went cheerfully to turn his room into a death-trap, mats in front of doors, lethal wires to complete the circuit if a foolish, sleepy human forgot and hurried to shut his own garden door in a sudden rainstorm.
He had been scared of the events last night. Now he was mad, furiously angry at the disruption of his life, his quarters, his freedom to come and go in the city—he foresaw guards, restrictions, threats . . . without a damned reason, except some lunatic who possibly, for whatever reason, didn’t like humans. That was the only conclusion he could come to.
He sat down on the step where the paidhi-aiji was entitled to sit, and listened through the last pre-audience audience with the notion that he might hear something to give him a clue, at least, whether there was some wider, more political reason to worry, but the way Banichi seemed to be holding information from him, and Tabini’s silence, when Tabini himself probably knew something he wasn’t saying, all began to add up to him to an atevi with a grudge.
No licensed assassin was going to file on a human who was an essential, treatied presence in the
aiji’s household—a presence without the right to carry arms, but all the same, a court official and a personal intimate of the aiji of the Western Association. No professional in his right mind would take that on.
Which left some random fool attacking him as a symbol, perhaps, or someone mad at technology or at some equally remote grievance, who could know? Who could track such a thing?
The only comforting thought was that, if it wasn’t a licensed assassin, it was the lunatic himself or an amateur who couldn’t get a license—the sort that might mow down bystanders by mistake, true, dangerous in that regard.
But Banichi, unlike the majority of the aiji’s guards, had a license. You didn’t take him on. You didn’t take on Jago, either. The rain last night had been a piece of luck for the intruder—who had either counted on the rain wiping out his tracks on the gravel and cement of the garden walkways, or he’d been stupid, and lucky.
Now the assassin wasn’t lucky. Banichi was looking for him. And if he’d left a footprint in a flower bed or a fingerprint anywhere, that man—assuming it was a man—was in trouble.
He daren’t go to a licensed doctor, for one thing. There had been blood on the terrace. Bren personally hoped he’d made life uncomfortable for the assassin, who clearly hadn’t expected the reception he’d met. Most of all he hoped, considering Banichi’s taking on the case, that life would become uncomfortable for the assassin’s employer, if any, enough for the employer to withdraw the contract.
The doors opened. The guards and marshals let the crowd in, and the secretary accepted from the Day Marshal the towering stack of ribboned, sealed petitions and affidavits and filings.
There were some odd interfaces in the dealings of atevi and humans. One couldn’t blame the atevi for clinging to traditional procedures, clumsy as the stacks were, and there was a computer record. The secretaries in the foyer created it.
But ask the atevi to use citizen numbers or case numbers? Convince them first that their computer-assigned personal numbers were auspicious in concert with their other numerologies. Convince them that changing those numbers caused chaos and lost records—because if things started going wrong, an ateva faulted his number and wanted it changed, immediately.
Create codes for the provinces, simply to facilitate computer sorting? Were those numbers auspicious, or was it some malevolent attempt of the aiji’s court in Shejidan to diminish their importance and their power?
Then, of course, there was the dire rumor that typing the names in still produced numbers in the computers, numbers of devious and doubtless malevolent intent on the part of the aiji, conspiring, of course, with the humans who had brought the insidious device to earth.
Not all that humans brought to earth was anathema, of course. Television was an addiction. Flight was an increasingly essential convenience, practiced as see-and-avoid by frighteningly determined provincials, although the aiji had laid down the law within his domains, requiring flight plans, after the famous Weinathi Bridge crash.
Thank the atevi gods Tabini-aiji was a completely irreligious man.
The matters before the aiji had one turn of the glass apiece—a summation, by the petitioner. Most were rural matters, some involved trade, a few regarded public works projects—highways and dams and bridges, harbors and hunting and fishing rights which involved the rights of the Associations united under the aiji’s influence. Originating projects and specific details of allocation and budget involved the two houses of the legislature, the hasdrawad and the tashrid—such bills were not the aiji’s to initiate, only to approve or disapprove. But so much, so incredibly much, still needed the aiji’s personal seal and personal hearing.
For chief example, there were the feuds to register, two in number, one a wife against an ex-husband, over illegal conversion of her property.
“It’s better to go to court,” Tabini said plainly. “You could get the money back, in installments, from his income.”
“I’d rather kill him,” the wife said, and Tabini said, “Record it,” waved his hand and went on to the next case.
That was why humans preferred their enclave on Mospheira. Mospheira was an island, it was under human administration, computers had undisputed numbers, and laws didn’t have bloodfeud as an alternative.
It did, however, mean that for all the sixty so-called provinces and conservatively three hundred million people under the aiji’s hand, there was a single jail, which generally held less than fifty individuals awaiting trial or hearing, who could not be released on their own recognizance. There were a number of mental hospitals for those who needed them. There were four labor-prisons, for the incorrigibly antisocial—the sort, for instance, who took the assassins’ function into their own hands, after refusal by a guild who did truly refuse unwarranted solicitation.
Sane, law-abiding atevi simply avoided argumentative people. One tried to have polite divorces. One tried not to antagonize or embarrass one’s natural opponents. Thank God atevi generally did prefer negotiation or, as a last reasonable resort before filing feud, a physical, unarmed confrontation—equally to be avoided. Tall, strong humans still stood more than a head shorter and massed a third less than the average atevi, male or female—the other reason humans preferred their own jurisdiction.
He’d clearly annoyed somebody who hadn’t followed the rules. His mind kept going back to that. No one had filed a feud. They had to notify him, that was one of the stringent requirements of the filing, but no one had even indicated casual irritation with him—and now Tabini was putting lethal defenses into his quarters.
The shock of the incident last night was still reverberating through his thinking, readjusting everything, until he had suddenly to realize he really wasn’t entirely safe walking the halls out there. Professional assassins avoided publicity and preferred their faces not to become famous—but there were instances of the knife appearing out of the faceless crowd, the push on the stairs.
And in no few of the lords’ staffs there were licensed assassins he daily rubbed shoulders with and never thought about it—until now.
An elderly gentleman brought the forty-sixth case, which regarded, in sum, a request for the aiji’s attendance at a regional conference on urban development. That went onto the stack, for archive.
One day, he’d told the aiji himself, and he knew his predecessors had said it, one day the archives would collapse under the weight of seals, ribbons, and paper, all ten stories of the block-long building going down in a billow of dust. But this had to be the last petition for the session. The secretary called no more names. The reception table looked empty.
But, no, not the last one. Tabini called the secretary, who brought an uncommonly elaborate paper, burdened with the red and black ribbons of high nobility.
“A filing of Intent,” Tabini said, rising, and startling the aides and assembled witnesses, and the secretary held up the document and read: “Tabini-aiji against persons unknown, who, without filing Intent, invaded the peace of my house and brought a threat of harm against the person of the paidhi-aiji, Bren Cameron. If harm results henceforth to any guest or person of my household by this agency or by any other agency intending harm to the paidhi-aiji, I personally declare Intent to file feud, because of the offense to the safety of my roof, with Banichi of Dajoshu township of Talidi province as my registered and licensed agent. I publish it and cause it to be published, and place it in public records with its seals and its signatures and sigils.”
Bren was thoroughly shocked. He felt altogether conspicuous in the turning heads and the murmur of comment and question that followed as Tabini-aiji left the dais and walked past him, with:
“Be prudent, nadi Bren.”
“Aiji-ma,” he murmured, and bowed a profound bow, to cover his confusion. The audience was over. Jago was quick to fall in with Tabini, along with a detachment of the household and personal guard, as Tabini cut a swath through the crowd on his way to the side doors and the inner halls.
Bren started away on h
is own, dreading the course through the halls, wondering if the attempted assassin or his employer was in the room and whether the police escort would still be waiting out there.
But Banichi turned up in his path, and fell in with him, escorting him through the Whispering Port and into the public halls.
“Tabini declared Intent,” he said to Banichi, wondering if Banichi had known in advance what Tabini had drafted.
“I’m not surprised,” Banichi said.
“I ought to take the next plane to Mospheira.”
“Highly foolish.”
“We have different laws. And on Mospheira an ateva stands out. Find me the assassin in this crowd.”
“You don’t even know it was one of us.”
“Then it was the broadest damn human I ever saw. —Forgive me.” One didn’t swear, if one was the paidhi-aiji, not, at least, in the public hall. “It wasn’t a human. I know that.”
“You know who came to your room. You don’t know, however, who might have hired him. There is some smuggling on Mospheira, as the paidhi is aware. Connections we don’t know exist are a very dangerous possibility.”
The language had common pronouns that didn’t specify gender. Him or her, that meant. And politicians and the aiji’s staff used that pronoun habitually.
“I know where I’m safer.”
“Tabini needs you here.”
“For what?” That the aiji was undertaking anything but routine business was news to him. He hadn’t heard. Banichi was telling him something no one else had.
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