by Patty Jansen
“You’re asking the wrong question.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m busy and stressed out.” I was dropping balls, but with Coldi, you could never, ever, afford to drop balls, because someone else would pick them up and run away with them. I took a sip from the water. It was sweet and wonderfully cold.
“You should have asked: why did Nicha choose this young man?”
What? “But I have been asking . . .” That was like . . . Did she really want to challenge her zhayma?
She came closer to me, enveloping me with her scent. I smelled it at night, when she slept in my arms. “This needs sorting out. Nich’ has not been the same ever since he returned from custody after Sirkonen’s murder.”
In the deep, dark pit of my heart, I agreed with her. Nicha had been present, but not really there in the way he used to be. I’d thought that this was a result of my relationship with Thayu and the changing dynamic of our group, but those chilling moments in Ezhya Palayi’s hub when I’d shot his challenger Taysha and realised that if I’d been Coldi I would have had Ezhya’s position had left deep scars in me.
Hell, it had left deep scars in everyone who knew what had happened. Nicha was one of those people. I could still see his face when I told him what happened while we were sitting in Ezhya’s aircraft on the way back from Asto to Barresh. When I’d just decided to accept inclusion in the Domiri clan, which was not his clan.
“We need to sort this out,” she said in an even lower voice.
I nodded, feeling the stain of darkness creep into my heart. I loved Nicha. I didn’t want to put pressure on him. I definitely didn’t want to blame him for anything that had happened in the past.
“Do it. Sooner, rather than later. He needs to understand your position before he can discipline Reida. We need to know what Reida was doing there.”
I nodded again.
“I’m not sure you fully understand the full implications of this.” Again, that dead-serious look. A chill went over my back.
“Wait—are you suggesting that Nicha has selected Reida because Nicha still has some loyalty tangled up elsewhere?”
She let a deep, worrying silence lapse. I took it as a yes.
“But how can that be? He grew up in Athens, London and Rotterdam.”
“He lived with our mother. How well do you know her?”
“Not well at all.” I’d met their mother once, at the Exchange in Athens. She was a Palayi woman, who had, so far, been a bit of a mystery to me. An administrator for Asto’s affairs. Had worked mostly on Earth, although I didn’t think she was still there. At one point she must have liked Nicha and Thayu’s father, Asha Domiri, having had two children with him, but I understood that the two had since fallen out badly. Over what, I had no idea, but let’s just assume it had its roots in political or ideological differences. Asha was a military commander, as hardline as they came. His reaction to the zeyshi claim was nuke from orbit. That would make their mother . . . pro-cooperation or even pro-Aghyrian? So . . . let’s assume that Nicha or Nicha’s contact didn’t like the influence Asha had on our association, so they ordered him to appoint someone who countered that influence.
Holy shit.
Thayu met my eyes. She only nodded.
“All right. I’ll talk to him.”
“No. Not talk. Order. Get it sorted. Find out where he stands. Find out where that boy’s loyalties lie. Move him up, down or sideways in your association. As soon as possible.”
A deep dread took hold of me. She was talking about yedama, a process I had only read about, where functions within an association were reassigned. Coldi people understood this instinctively, but how was I supposed to know whether Nicha and Thayu worked well as zhaymas or whether it would be better to, say, move Veyada up and Nicha to Veyada’s position?
Damn. I liked having Thayu and Nicha together. I didn’t want to change anything.
“Promise me.” She grabbed my arm in a strong grip. “You wanted to understand us, live like us and do this right?”
It wasn’t a question and I didn’t need to answer it. It didn’t even matter whether I wanted this. I was already in far too deep. There was no going back. The only way forward was to face the trouble.
I got the deep gut-churning realisation that this was probably why Nicha had suddenly decided to go into a contract with that woman, why he had been avoiding me. This had started happening not just recently, but ever since returning from custody on Earth.
And I had been too busy, too pre-occupied with his sister, to do anything about it.
I said softly to Thayu, “All right. This is what we’ll do until it gets sorted. I don’t want Reida on any task more sensitive than delivering messages. I’d prefer if he didn’t leave the complex because we have no control over what he gets up to in town. We need to keep all our information close to our chest for the negotiations. As for Nicha: I think he’ll understand the reasons if I prefer to take Veyada to meetings with the zeyshi delegation.” Because of Veyada’s extensive legal knowledge.
“Good. I’ll tell both of them.” She sounded a little too self-righteous for my liking. Did she really want her brother to get into trouble?
Most likely, she did not, but the enormously competitive society of Asto made the Coldi appear very hard-nosed at times. I had to force myself to remember that there was love underneath all that bluster and posturing. But right now, that was easy to forget.
Chapter 6
* * *
WE FINISHED EATING, and all too soon it was time to go. I felt like a coward for not wanting to return home, but there was no delaying it.
“You know what else you should do?” Thayu said in a low voice as we walked down the street on our way to the station.
No, I didn’t know. My mind was numb from the revelations about Nicha. It scarcely had room for anything else.
“Sooner or later, with your involvement in Coldi associations, you will come across a situation where there will be a fight over a position. Without training, with scrawny arms like yours, there is no chance that you will survive.”
Gee, thanks, Thay’. “I’m not Coldi. I can’t win anyway.”
“I wouldn’t say that, and I’d very much hate for you to die because you never trained.”
As usual, Thayu was right. “So, what do you want me to do? Train like a professional fighter?”
“That would be a start. I also want you to go armed at all times.”
“But why—”
“No. For once, listen to what I say. Your status allows you to carry arms. No one I know who has that status does not carry arms.”
“I thought people frowned upon using anything except bare hands in association fights?”
“No. There usually just isn’t the time to draw a weapon.”
That was true. I’d seen one of those fights once at the Exchange in Athens. Two Coldi people who were not associated with each other, but who had to work together met in the corridor. They looked each other in the eyes and lunged for each other without speaking a word. Everyone else in the group simply stepped aside and let it happen. The fight was over in seconds. Surprise and quick moves were everything. I guessed there would be no harm in learning to avoid being run into the ground by a bull with the agility of a panther and the strength of a bear. If I had time to draw a weapon, I might survive an attack like that. If I kept it at the stun setting, the other person would survive, too.
Still, the thought of always going armed didn’t appeal to me. “All right. I’ll do some training, but—”
“You will do both: get training and always have a gun on you. I want you to live. I want you to use the gun if necessary.”
“Even against people I know?” Like Nicha, or heaven forbid, people high in the Asto hierarchy?
“Anyone who attacks. They won’t be attacking because they dislike you. They’ll be attacking because they have a reaction to you. If you avoided a fight, the instinct would keep firing each time you met this person and that would
be far too distracting. If this person needs to work with you, they would never be loyal to you or the project, and would continue to undermine your position.”
I knew that, but . . . “Why are you saying all this now? Is there someone you think might attack? I thought fights were rare.”
“They are, in a stable environment. The current environment is not stable. In fact, there is a great unrest in the Coldi associations in Barresh. I haven’t established the source, but it likely is some fallout from the changes in the top of Asto’s leadership. You are directly involved through my father, so I assume you to be a target.”
And here was another thing: because I had accepted Domiri clan membership from the leader of that clan, did that mean that I had some sort of relationship to him? Asha Domiri had moved up in the hierarchy, and there were likely to be people not happy with that.
I had gone a few paces before I realised that Thayu had stopped in the middle of the street. I turned back to her. “Thay’? What’s going on?”
“This is the building.” She jerked her head to the left-hand side of the street.
Total change of subject. It was the building where Reida had been arrested, the commercial building that held some of the oldest businesses in town. There were shops and eating-houses on the ground floor and the three floors above that contained individual units for business premises. A gallery-style balcony ran along the front of each floor, giving access to each of the business suites. The walls were made from limestone blocks and the floor plates from a kind of concrete containing white pebbles that used to be a commonly-used construction material in Barresh—the white pebble quarry had run out a long time ago. That concrete and the blackwood trimmings—from a tree on the rainforest plateau that had black wood stronger than steel—made the building over four hundred years old. It had withstood two wars and many storms and was elegant in that nonchalant Barresh way.
There were still some lights on in offices on all of the floors.
I asked, my voice low, “Should we have a look upstairs?”
“Yeah, why not?” Thayu led me up the steps to the first floor. Our footsteps echoed in the bare stairwell. There were two galleries along both sides of the building. We found Marin Federza’s Trading office at the back, second last on the gallery. A curtain obscured the window, but judging from the distance between the next doors, the office didn’t look very big. I could see no signs of breaking in. Neither could I see any signs of people having climbed up here. It would have been easy: there was a rubbish bin directly under the balcony. Something a bunch of drunk louts would do.
“Why make all that effort of climbing over the balustrade while you can just walk up here?”
“These galleries are closed at night. Didn’t you see the gate at the bottom of the stairs?”
I hadn’t. Dumb Mr Wilson.
We leaned on the railing. The building had a small yard ending in a jumble of mismatched walls that surrounded the private yards of the houses on the other side.
Thick canopies of overhanging trees made it very dark here. The trees were mostly in the yards that were on the other side of a wall, which were oases of fountains, clipped bushes, garden benches and mosaic paths, but right now, the ground was pink from a carpet of fallen petals.
Thayu said, “I truly don’t know what Reida was doing here, and it disturbs me that Nicha hasn’t said anything about it.”
“Yeah, me, too. I also don’t think that the councillor’s daughter had anything to do with it. I think breaking into this office was his true aim.”
“I wonder if he got what he wanted. Did the guards say anything?”
“I think the guards were silenced by Federza. They mentioned no specifics about where Reida was caught. They didn’t mention Federza. They didn’t mention breaking into the office. They just talked about climbing the balcony.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s really hard for us to get information out of the Barresh guards as well. They’re more protective of their damn council families than they are of the council’s reputation.”
There was nothing much to see here, so we went back downstairs.
We turned into the street and had walked a little distance towards the main square and airport, where we needed to get on the train, when Thayu glanced over her shoulder.
Anyone following us? I asked through the feeder.
“It seems so.”
I peered into the darkness beyond the streetlights and the people who walked there. Tree branches hung over a wall that surrounded the compound that housed the council buildings. I didn’t see anything unusual.
“How can you tell?” Her night vision was much worse than mine.
“Devlin told me just then. There are two people following us, and he tracked them back to the time we left the council building.”
I’d had the hub upgraded and sometimes I wondered if the extra flood of information we got was beneficial or whether it made things more complicated. There were times like this when I thought we could well do without the extra information. If you were a reasonably high-profile gamra delegate, there were virtually always people following you. That didn’t mean that they did so out of ill will. They would be people from the various news services, people who wanted to speak to you in private, investigators hired by your rivals to see if you did anything illegal that they could pin on you and, yes, security, too.
She grabbed my arm. “Come.”
“Where to?” I wanted to go home. I didn’t care about people following us.
“We’re going to give them an excursion of the town.”
Before I could protest, she took off in the opposite direction, back towards the eating-house.
I ran after her. “Who are these people? Are they dangerous?”
Thayu held her hand to her ear, listening to some security briefing. I opened all channels on my feeder, but whatever she was listening to was buried deep in the stream. She was worried, that was all I understood.
We don’t know who they are, she said in response to my probing.
That in itself was cause for worry.
Thayu walked quickly and I had trouble keeping up with her. She was right that I could probably use some fitness training. Days spent sitting in meetings or at a desk did little good for me, and moving slowly into middle age didn’t help either.
We went from one street to another and sometimes cut across using the alleys that ran behind the back yards of the stately houses, and that had originally been built for domestic staff and to collect rubbish.
Barresh was a low-lying city, with the highest point of the island a mere ten metres or so above sea level. This had, in the past, led to drainage problems when the rains came and big cascades of water fell into the delta from the escarpment. About fifty years ago, at the time when the gamra island was being built, someone had the idea of digging a network of canals through the problematic streets in lieu of the underground stormwater drains that forever backed up when they were most needed. The resulting canals crisscrossed that low-lying part of the city which stretched from a few blocks behind the council building to the eastern side of the island. Market Street itself mostly remained spared because it was the oldest and highest part of the old town. The canals were interconnected and closed off from the surrounding marshes by a set of locks that were usually closed to keep the water level in the canals high enough for boats, but that were opened after big rains. The network of waterways provided a public transport system.
As we came out of an alley, we arrived at one of the canals. There was a ferry stop here, a little jetty with a bench for people waiting, now bathed in greenish light from a street lamp. A boat was at the jetty, and the driver, a Pengali man, had just cast off the ropes.
“Wait!” Thayu called.
The driver and the two passengers turned around. The driver grabbed the jetty pylon with one hand while cutting the engine with the other.
We ran onto the jetty and into the boat. It was long and narrow like a broad canoe,
and wobbled when we walked between the two rows of single seats. The two other passengers were a Pengali woman with a couple of baskets and a keihu young man who sat at the very front. He nodded at me when we passed. “Good evening, Delegate.”
Thayu and I sat in seats across the centre aisle from each other. The driver gunned the engine, and the boat sped across the canal. Thayu studied the receding jetty and street behind us until we went around a corner.
She smiled. “That’s them taken care of.”
“Any idea yet who they were?”
“If I knew that, they wouldn’t be following.” Another security mantra.
“Where is this boat going?”
She looked around. “I don’t know, but we’ll get a water taxi back home from wherever we end up.”
The boat stopped at another jetty surrounded by houses. I asked Thayu if we should get off, and she said to wait. The keihu man got off here, to be replaced with two chattering Pengali girls who sat at the front where he had been sitting. I was fascinated by how their tails moved when they spoke; that movement was extra-visible because of the dye that made the tips of their tails glow green in one girl and orange in the other.
After a few more stops, and having turned a good number of corners, I could see moonlight on the water ahead.
The last stop on the route was at the very edge of the island. The jetty was right next to the lock—now closed to keep the water level in the canal high enough for the boats.
The two Pengali girls got off and vanished into a dark street. Their glowing tails were the last I saw of them.
“Get off here, or go back,” the driver said to me, in heavily accented Coldi.
“No, we’ll get off.” Thayu gave him some of the money pearls and we stepped onto the jetty. The boat turned around and zoomed back in the direction from which we had come, leaving us alone on the deserted street with the moonlight reflecting off the marshlands.