Invader: Book Two of Foreigner

by C. J. Cherryh

  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-com, 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-com 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-com, 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 thinking.

  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 n
othing 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.